Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Lear sits in the heart of literary criticism. It is in the discussion of Lear that the terms “data” and “critical data” come up for the first time in literary studies: “data” in an 1819 lecture by Samuel Coleridge and “critical data” in an influential essay by Stanley Cavell that was published in 1987. No other work of literature has produced as much insight into intelligent design nor placed as much stress on interpretive validity. Inspired by this tradition of seeing through Lear, Professor Nan Z. Da tests the ability of literary criticism to accurately depict great acts of wronging and their corresponding predicaments in a recently published personal book on the history of Maoist totalitarianism in China. Professor Da will also be presenting new work, still inspired by this tradition, that makes a radical proposal for where literary criticism is-- not as a practice in this or that domain but something which slices through all domains at the spot where data becomes inference.

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Co-sponsored by The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

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Nan Z Da 笪章难 is an associate professor in the Department of English at John's Hopkins University. Da's teaching and scholarship cover nineteenth-century American and trans-Atlantic literature and letters, modern Chinese literature and letters, literary and social theory, and the intersection of literary studies and the data sciences. She is interested in empiricism and its difficult cases, the mechanisms of disambiguation, and the relationships between literature and complexity and parrhesia and literary criticism.