Because I teach writing at a university, and because being a writer is presumably a prerequisite for having this job, I am frequently asked what I think identifies someone as a writer. Being no expert on the matter, just another confused practitioner, I opt for a rather simple diagnostic: writers are people who write; people intimately bound up, even lost, in their verbs and their verbiage; people who recover, from the din of their minds, not just sounds or images, but words. By this elementary logic, a writer who remembers things is a specific kind of scribe, a memoirist, and one who strews random jottings across the internet is another, a shitposter like our president. Those who write criticism—words interpreting other people’s words, as well as their films, art pieces, and performances—are their own varietal. These writers are critics.
Uninspired criticism is often derided for its formulaic structure, a design flaw or feature that Zadie Smith, a great writer and more-than-occasional critic, gets at in her response to a 2012 interview question asking her to differentiate between creative and critical writing: “When I write criticism I’m in such a protected position: here are my arguments, here are my blessed opinions, here is my textual evidence, here my rhetorical flourish. One feels very pleased with oneself.” It’s that “protected position” enjoyed by the critic that most offends the anti-criticism writer. Criticism may purport to do something daring by taking hold of a literary text or cultural moment and undressing it for the reader, but the critic risks little in this vicarious striptease, little but the novelty or strength of their ideas. Bad criticism likes to signal its own goodness by erecting a mini-fortress of stentorian-sounding arguments. Good readers will stop at the castle’s moat, its algae-rimed lit review, before picking up a novel instead.
I tend to agree that there is something quite vacuous about critical writing that exists merely to mint “new” theories via the liberal use of the Ctrl + I keys. (Why does one need to trademark so many new ideas when older ones like “realism,” “intersectionality,” or “gender performativity” are still around to be debated, flogged, or decried?) But not all criticism hews to the same plug-and-chug equations, and not all critics seek to get their flowers by self-assigning originality to trivial turns of phrase. Some critical acts of language are both humbler and more convincing to encounter. They operate not by creating lexical bloat, but by combing out all the infelicities that gather like nits in a discourse’s overtheorized pelt; or by salvaging little truths from the ruins of larger ones; or by bearing down on what is false and unclear in a textual situation without generating fresh falsehoods of their own. Such diligent hairsplitting is not specific to academic criticism—you may know it by the center-left’s favored phrase of “critical thinking”—but criticism is unique in that nearly its entire corpus is composed of such thinking. A good critic does not start out with a theory, though her thinking may bring her to the precipice of one. She sets out, instead, from an impulse to restore an omission or to right an untruth, however minor in scale. Critics in this vein take on all sorts of risks: the risk of getting it wrong, or of saying the right thing before the wrong audience. The risk of being found out as a critic.
Consider Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play I’ve been reading while trying to teach my classes. In the insular world of every writing classroom, one of my pedagogical hobbyhorses is to try and remind myself as much as my students that writing only happens in service to something we want to say, and what we want to say does not exist outside history. Indeed, history can turn in an instant and make saying what we want to say less possible; it can also birth a tragedy from what we cannot or will not say in the moment. Reading King Lear instills this lesson better than most texts, because Lear is essentially a tale about criticism flinging itself onto the pyre. In Lear, the critic’s charge to abstain from falsehood, to tell it as it is, becomes synonymous with the labors of love.
The play opens on a test: a senescent king evaluating the devotion of his daughters. Each shall receive a third of Lear’s kingdom, with the “largest bounty” going to the child who most dramatically bares her heart before an audience. Lear pretends he is doing a good deed here, turning his kingdom over to “younger strengths” in a roughly meritocratic fashion. But as in meritocracy, there is a lie behind the gift—Lear has a favorite daughter, Cordelia, to whom he plans to accord the choicest bequest. His lie is repaid in kind by the unfavored daughters, Goneril and Regan, who match the king’s cringey demand for tribute by stating their love in the most grandiloquent and empty of phrases. Only Cordelia, the most beloved and loving daughter, refuses to stoop to the occasion. Her prerogative is to “love, and be silent,” because unlike her sisters, Cordelia does love her father, and genuine feelings cannot be overstated beyond their correct dimensions. This refusal—a critical one—incenses the king and puts Cordelia in the difficult position of a conscientious objector to love’s compelled expression. She is banished forthwith from the kingdom, and to his untrue daughters, Lear disburses the spoils.
You well know how this goes from here. That things will only get worse; that the false love and false speech abjured by the critic will ramify into yet more dissimulation. In King Lear, motherless children are forever turning against their fathers and casting them out of the castle. The noble-minded are outmaneuvered, the truth-seeking deprived of their senses, the purehearted driven to early and unsightly deaths. A pall of unknowability falls over Lear’s kingdom, or in his jester’s words, “the realm of Albion / Come to great confusion.” By King Lear’s final lines, there’s hardly anyone alive enough to say what happened.
The writer and critic Nan Z. Da believes that “Lear anticipates totalitarianism, Left and Right, East and West.” A totalizing force must shape reality toward its own ends, and this shaping process tends to derange the truth while disorienting its tellers, engulfing them in the unremitting turbulence of Learian conditions. Now this: militarized federal agents fanning out across Minneapolis to hallow the hounding of the undocumented. Now this: the Department of Justice pursuing only the cases founded on bad blood or political optics. No one can get their facts straight, let alone tether each cause to all its potential effects. Was it only a year ago that a ring of masked men arrested a woman in Somerville for the crime of co-authoring an op-ed about Gaza in her student newspaper? What else was happening as that woman—a PhD candidate, a critic—sat for forty-five days in an ICE prison in Louisiana? Why is it already so hard to remember?
It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes like Lear’s to make it so hard to remember, to clutter up every frame of reference and render criticism inutile or feckless. “Lear places a great strain on interpretive validity, on accurate assessment and recall,” writes Da. We are living and writing now at the crux of all that strain.
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Last summer, Da published a book about the faith critics must place in criticism, a book that amalgamates literary interpretation with historiography and memoir. In The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, Da fulfills the critic’s basic duty of close-reading a text, but she does so with ulterior motives, transposing the play well outside its immediate context, from Shakespearean England to Maoist China. The play’s portability hinges on both its transcendent qualities—how Lear shepherds every reader to “the very heart of literary criticism”—as well as Lear’s more localized relevance for Da and other Chinese readers. (She calls it the “most ‘Chinese’ ” of Shakespeare’s plays.) Our critic has read Lear countless times; it operates “talismanically” in her mind. She has watched its internecine disputes play out in her own family history.
That history is set at the “tail end” of the twentieth century in China, a frightful timespan in which successive Anti-Rightist purges, betrayals among the “dearest of the dear,” and a slew of artificially created “natural disasters,” including the deadliest famine in human history, combined to deprive an estimated 58 million Chinese people of their mortal coils. It is exceedingly difficult to conceive of such figures—let alone tell the stories that shadow each numeral—when the perpetrating party still has control over country and narrative. Da’s answer is to notch her own Cordelia-esque refusal: to not tell the story at all, or rather, to limit her hand to a “literary critic’s gambit.” Her version of a hat trick is thrillingly ambitious. She sets her readers’ sights on the tumult of China’s long twentieth century and then gifts them a Lear-shaped looking glass with which to properly see it.
While The Chinese Tragedy may bill itself as a hybrid project, much like in Lear it is clear from the outset which of Da’s methodological children she prizes above the rest. The book may flirt with an essayist’s aphoristic style—”Love is so feared because it is in love’s nature to show others who you really are”—but it is Da’s scholarly attunement to minute leitmotifs and their enfolding conditions that grants the book its legs. These recurrent patterns are both textual and extraliterary in nature. As Da writes,
Before we can understand the extent of King Lear’s experiment with history—its commitment to history writing—we have to accept the careworn historian’s first and fundamentally ahistorical premise: something from the distant past is happening again. The writer who uses historical allusion to critique the present is counting on the real possibility of large-scale reenactment. He is counting on the fact that we needn’t turn to the imagination to see Lear played out in real life—not just in pre-Arthurian or Elizabethan/Jacobean England but later, in our lifetime.
In this book, Lear becomes a kind of spatiotemporal free agent, a tale unmoored in place and time, and yet intricately bound to history. Da’s book reads the play by these terms; she reads it transhistorically, as evidence of the longue durée of texts, and of criticism. Despite what the title implies, The Chinese Tragedy doesn’t seek to pose any of what Da calls the “ludicrous analogies” between China and the West—the kinds of overarching comparisons that might project an easy similitude onto Leir and Mao, monarchy and communism, what transpired in twentieth-century China and what is unfolding now in Hungary, Israel, or the United States. If such comparisons do flit across the reader’s mind, as they certainly did for me, they appear only as ghostly footnotes to Da’s hermeneutic project. What’s in motion here are not nations and their peoples, but words. Stories like Lear—stories about filial impiety and irreparable harm—happen both here and there. They happen all the time. Observing and delineating their serial occurrence is one of many tasks entrusted to a critic.
Take Da’s account of Maoist China’s horrors, a series of real events that Lear’s plotline sticks to like a discomfiting second skin. Just like in Lear, the CCP redistributed land and resources by inciting a prefab revolution in which “ ‘Landlords,’ most of whom were just slightly better-off peasants, were killed in the millions, often by neighbors who were only slightly less well off.” Just like in Lear, those of dubious class standing were sent into the countryside to wander or perish. Just like in Lear—a play in which two guests pluck out the eyes of their host—Chinese citizens torched the most sacrosanct of bonds for the sake of a power grab, or to redirect their suffering toward other quarters. During the Great Famine, a man named Zhang Siwa “clubbed his own twelve-year-old daughter to death and cooked her” in a desperate bid to outlast his hunger. (He didn’t.) A few years later, Liu Shaoqi, a potential successor to Mao, chose to implicate his own son rather than lose his political standing, only to die alone in a Henan garret with hay in his stomach.
The Chinese Tragedy exhumes these grisly tales to show how “Learian tragedy go[es] all in for more Learian tragedy.” In other words, moral clarity did not arrive with Mao’s death in 1976, the subsequent show trial of the Gang of Four, or the many years of 改革开放 (“Reform and Opening-Up”) which followed. It didn’t arrive, because criticism was also late to the scene. Some Chinese people were allowed to share their stories of traumatization, but not for too long, and rarely with real verisimilitude. Blame had to bypass the state in every instance, even if it was blind love for the state that initially midwifed the madness. This lack of primary or even shared culpability is one reason why China’s twentieth century feels so Learian to Da. “Surely we can have agreement on objective facts, on the matter of who started it, who was more cruel along the way?” she asks, before concluding that, actually, “Tragedy says no.”
Of those who survived, few have had anything too critical to say about the past. Da writes of CCP lifers like her nainai, who despite experiencing firsthand the exigencies of state-initiated terror, still puts her hand to her heart today and thanks the party for her perdurance. She writes of uncles and cousins who’ve fully committed themselves to twenty-first-century China’s newly endorsed values of capitalist increase and nationalist nostalgia, becoming, in no time at all, replicants of the same state that so scarred their elders. Even Xi Jinping, Da observes, is “still stuck in his own Learian tragedy.” After Xi’s father was dramatically purged in 1962, the teenage Xi was “first ostracized at school, then denounced and sent to a remote region of Shanxi.” If China’s present trajectory under its term-unlimited president is any indication, however, the Xi family’s struggles did not implant in the one-day “paramount leader” any aversion to political brinkmanship or cults of personality.
At the close of the twentieth century, many Chinese people chose a different means of avoiding whatever halting process of reckoning was or wasn’t afoot in Mao’s fallen kingdom. They sent their hopes abroad, as Da’s parents did in the early nineties and as my parents did the year before Tiananmen. They cauterized their mythic Chinese roots and entered the equally mythic category of the immigrant.
To the liberal Westerner who likes to imagine these immigrants gazing with gimlet eyes back at the country they’d left, piercing the shroud totalitarianism wraps around accurate recall, Da basically says, “Don’t hold your breath.”
It took a long time for the Chinese and the Chinese diaspora to find the language and psychological capacity even to say that something happened to them, and to their parents and grandparents. You cannot rely on diasporic expats to tell the story, even if serious language and cultural barriers have been overcome. It’s a simple matter of numbers. Those who did the harming or were completely complicit had far better access to opportunities to live and study elsewhere.
It’s a simple matter of numbers—the math that waylays critical retelling. My two parents, their three American-born children, my four grandparents, three uncles, two cousins, no aunts. By most measures, ours is not an expansive Chinese family. When it came to emerging unscathed from Mao’s China, both sample size and luck were on our side. I cannot know if my parents or their parents were “completely complicit” with the Learian tragedies of those years. I’m sure they heard some stories, and maybe witnessed other stories they prefer not to rehash. Growing up, I cannot remember one instance when anyone in my family spoke of their suffering in political terms, or even shared reminiscences among themselves of what life was like during the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution, when millions of their countrymen disappeared into the wind. My parents seemed to view China as an economic backwater they’d airlifted themselves out of with the help of a Western science education, not as an abusive, power-hoarding state they’d foregone paternal love and proximity to escape.
Da was born in China in 1985. Her own ties to the country and its recent history are far less vaporous than mine, and yet even she struggles to assign to her family’s experiences the correct proportionality of emotions—of anger, sorrow, or love. The splashes of personal writing that appear in The Chinese Tragedy paint the picture of a family life rife with doublespeak and chicanery. Da’s maternal grandfather, a star of the Peking opera scene, plied his craft for “state leaders like Yuan Shikai, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong” before a whimsical turn in political correctness rendered his life’s work “counterrevolutionary” and “bourgeois.” He would write in one of his own memoirs about how cruelly language can be twisted to conceal reality, how “everyone became an exaggerator, and we all lived out meaningless lives amid this hot air.” As for the young child whose first breaths were made of such air, there was only the slightest gap between tragedy and romance, a genre conflation the characters of King Lear understand all too well. “People making terrible scenes structured the rhythms of [my] childhood,” Da writes, “but it was so pleasurable to be alive.”
So much misery and so much pandemonium, but also, these arcane slashes of light. “I remember the brightness of the square and the traffic of bicycles and automobiles in all directions,” the daughter-turned-critic remarks; “How light and portable my pain seems now,” muses a son. Is this ahistorical conversation about Da’s childhood? The slaughterhouse floor of postwar China? King Lear? The reader has to wonder if there is any meaningful difference.
For Da, there are always differences, just not enough people willing to parse them. In her extended body of work, Da has continually made a case for the importance of noting “slight distinctions,” often foregrounding the conceptual and interpersonal problems that arise when this fine-grained art—the art of distinction-making, of criticism—is abandoned, allowed to lie fallow, or worst of all, steamrolled by authoritarian despots. (“Between 1930 and 1946,” Da writes, “the party would kill off 90 to 95 percent of its intellectuals. It was still early days.”) Da argues in her first book, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (2018), that for criticism to land at all, it must find a way to slow down the racing rhetorics of institutions and regimes, the concerted drive these bodies make toward simplification and shibboleth, toward a necrotic discourse in which distinctions cease to be perceived. “Institutional rhetoric takes a passing moment and reframes it as a telling one, with no real attention given to the moment itself; literary criticism takes that same passing moment and dilates it so that we can see all the factors contributing to its passing quality.” Because the critic necessarily moves at a slower pace than the propagandist, they are liable to be silenced in the midst of their task, struck down or left on read. It is this “plight of the critic” that’s most at stake in Da’s writing; this “plight of the critic” that forms a fundamental connectivity between what happens in King Lear and what happens in any society captured by totalitarian rigor mortis.
If The Chinese Tragedy’s strands of personal remembrance recreate anything, it is the origin to Da’s own “literary-critical consciousness.” When Da was a preschooler in Hangzhou, she took part in a block-stacking challenge in which a box set of Children’s World Classics was awarded to second place. (For the champion, a giant stuffed animal.) Da fell at the first hurdle, but “because some uncle or uncle of an uncle knew someone in the educational publishing bureau,” the Classics were hers nonetheless. She found Lear, or Lear found her, and this meeting between child and text is described almost like a first kiss or other fateful encounter, conveying to the child that even in the belly of a Learian life, possibilities for egress remained. “If a piece of world literature can come to a child in affordable codex form, that means that things are still okay,” the ever-hopeful critic intones. Here literature is held up as salvific, but not in the usual way we dream it to be. It saves not by transforming the reading child’s outlook, let alone her temperament or value system, but by turning her into a reader to begin with: someone who can say what is happening in a text, what will change and what will redound; someone for whom a keen alertness to harm and illogic is not just nice to have, but a life preserver in every fray.
When I was a younger man, I was afflicted with a desire to write about China, a part of the world I was only tangentially connected to by ties I seemed predisposed to miscomprehend. This errant poetics of the mother country is a touchstone of Chinese American letters, an idiom adopted by many huayi with ready access to e-books and Delta miles. I still don’t know what this interest was about, or if my interest had any content at all. I was frequently flying in and out of Pudong airport in those years, or scaling mountains in Shandong with vague-to-me Daoist connotations. I read a lot of books about China, mostly nonfiction authored by white men with foreign press credentials, and began participating intramurally in the expatriate’s game of East-West whataboutism, these unedifying attempts to weigh past American imperialism and current cultural hegemony against Chinese revanchism and social surveillance, as if the common threads of greed and preening self-love were not more important to identify, analyze, and critique.
For one year, I lived in a major Chinese city, teaching English and loitering about the mix of street stalls and hulking metallic vessels that comprised my gentrifying neighborhood. I thought of this as my last stab at going deeper into my “heritage culture.” What I found was that the linkages had been severed. What Chineseness I possessed felt stupidly general, and my parents’ and grandparents’ past lives were either unavailable to me or too boring to consider. “Those in diaspora exist in a place that is no place, inhabit an impossible metaphor.” So writes Saidiya Hartman. I’d gone east to test the plausibility of my own metaphors, all the fanciful conceptions I had of myself as a kind of cultural mongrel or cosmopolitan nomad, a by-turns tragic and glamorous byproduct of diasporic movement. Because I was and am a writer, I hoped to mine from these experiences a story of self-discovery or internal rapprochement: the itinerant child locating his laojia and fostering love for state, family, and self in the process.
In the end, all I gained from these efforts was just enough of a critical consciousness to know that both this story and its love were false.
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So what of states like my own, the love and fealty and criticism we owe to it? In a 2020 essay titled “Disambiguation: A Tragedy,” Da reflects on the “felt pointlessness” of deploying one’s critical faculties in a time when all criticism seems to only be arguing with itself: “Why bother disambiguating if to do so has no effect?” If we buy into Da’s pro-critical position, then this question itself becomes moot, for it is her firm stance that any literary critic who posits downstream effects to their work is not really doing the job of the critic. They are putting the cart in front of the horse, when in actuality, the cart should not matter to the critic. It should not matter, because carts are not horses; they are mute boxes separate from literary criticism’s living and thinking matrix. The act of writing criticism should not be measured by its effects, and those who try to do so are lying to someone, likely themselves. Spending time in a society where historical facts are habitually swallowed by forgetfulness or deception will quickly teach you that critical discernment—its continual refinement and “sub rosa” practice—is a gift horse valuable unto itself.
Given the state of emergency ambient in America and elsewhere, it is warranted to ask whether criticism—a practice with no demonstrable effects—should be set aside until the effectualness of resistance is no longer at such a premium. But Da is not saying that critical writing is the only or best line of defense against a rising or regnant dictator (one can always choose to flex less mandarin skills like organizing protests or perfecting their gallows humor). She is saying that criticism operates differently from these other tactics because it traffics almost exclusively in uncertainty, and this absence of certitude is a powerful, underutilized weapon that criticism offers to dissent. Moreover, this weapon is readily available to anyone with a desire, advisable or not, to use it. “Everyone has recourse to it,” Da writes. “To practice discernment is free.” Although authoritarian governments move with alacrity to muzzle their prominent critics, the broader collective’s daily acts of paying heed to a situation and its changing dynamics still allows criticism to survive by the skin of its teeth.
I’ve begun thinking that to worry at such length about the fruitlessness of critical writing only diverts attention from the objects of critique. This is especially annoying when the complaints are coming from inside the academy, from professors like myself who are unlikely to be at the vanguard of nontextual forms of resistance. Just because those other fomenting forms exist does not mean writers should beat a retreat from the arena of language that we know best. To prejudge our efforts as decadent hand-wringing is to assume we will always have other tools at our disposal. It is also to overlook the fact that, in the eyes of this administration at least, even rarefied academic fields like queer studies and critical race theory—both of which are just words at the end of the day—pose a threat to centralized authority.
Speaking to her colleagues in the American academy, Da wryly observes that “a version of our current disdain for intellectualism in favor of mere attitudinizing was already experienced by the Chinese.” Maoist China’s anti-intellectualism, a posture ironically shared by many American academics, has now found its most virile champions within an otherwise sandblasted federal government. Universities have been charged with an array of moral abuses ranging from ideological intolerance to the top-down rejiggering of student genders. These broadsides have been both highly effective (in placing universities under relentless rhetorical and financial duress) and utterly absurdist (in catching knowledge workers in a language game in which anything one says can be torqued beyond recognition). At my own institution, instructors are now legally bound to refrain from including any “DEI-related course[s]” in our required curricula. Since the definition of “DEI” in my state is intentionally fudgy, encompassing everything from “settler colonialism” to “allyship,” it is unclear what if anything we teach can pass the litmus tests applied by concerned parents and their querulous legislators.1 A play like King Lear could probably be taught without touching on the verboten themes of “marginalization” and “systemic oppression,” but an honest reading of the play could hardly buffer students from stumbling upon these illicit topics of their own accord. Here it is the legislature that acts the part of a venal, intemperate critic, defining its terms so broadly and forwarding its paranoiac theories so haphazardly that neither students nor teachers can parse what’s being criticized or banned, which is perhaps precisely the legislature’s aim. The right’s abandonment of even basic coherence in their rhetoric is not new, and just like in the past, critics opposed to such rhetoric need not abdicate their own commitment to sense-making in response, meeting bullshit with offal.
By deftly underscoring the many cross-pollinating elements of King Lear and modern Chinese history, The Chinese Tragedy teleports the play forward in time without adumbrating its literary specificity. The book models the style of transhistorical criticism that’s required for writing into and through this moment. Da bids her reader sit down, hold your pee, try and focus on what is happening right now on and off the stage, for all of it may be important to where we wind up at curtain’s close. In the version of the play that I’m watching, this is what is happening: an indiscriminate folding of personal into political identity; a tinny ring of falseness to what is widely touted as fact; a physical environment in which the weather is always souring; a mass, rapid, and wasteful deportation of lives and livelihoods; and finally, a turn in discourse “when propaganda—the generation of interested, insincere speech—becomes the fabric of relationality itself.” It is not just criticism’s impact or lack thereof that the critic must worry herself over, but a deep fissure in society’s communicative apparatus. We thought we knew what words were and what they should mean. A legal entity now says no, think again, and let me tell you this time what to think.
When times get dark for discourse, even the soberest critic starts to see their work as romantic. This lesson is imparted by The Chinese Tragedy’s very structure: the book begins with “Tales” and “History,” but ends on a chapter titled “Romance.” Da writes that “romantics believe . . . the arc of time bends toward justice, that people of the future will see the letters we’ve sent to them and make things right.” Criticism has no immediate effect except to nudge its readers’ minds into their own groove of critical thinking—no effects in the present, but bountiful future offspring. The romantically inclined critic is like the blinded Earl of Gloucester, who when asked by Lear how his cognizance of the world has outlived his ocular organs says, “I see it feelingly,” and leaves it at that.
One of my students recently invited me to a “Fall of Freedom” reading held in an art gallery at my local mall (the gallery’s previous space on Main Street had been taken over by Christian Nationalists). A group of teenage girls in matching gray sweatshirts was recording themselves swiveling their hips right across from the gallery’s entrance. I watched the girls dancing through the windows and tried to pay attention as each concerned citizen took their turn at the lectern. Some read original work, essays and poems about unholy baptisms and breaking bread with strangers. Others quoted from the work of others, standing in as mouthpieces for past critics.
For several semesters, Da has made her students read King Lear out loud to each other, “asking at every turn: How did this happen? How did we get here? If you do not remember, why might you not remember?” This last question is key. It dramatizes how easy it is under totalitarian systems to relinquish not only one’s rights or freedoms, but the very ability to interpret experience or to believe in what reading eyes feelingly see. The critic must have the confidence to stop the clock and say, loudly, that “Something is amiss here! Something is wrong!” But they must also possess the language for explicating, before an audience, why that wrongness is so wrong, and why its faultiness cannot be accepted without amendment or pause. Every English professor knows that the blister which blocks a critic from this task is not always self-inflicted. Texts like Lear are inherently difficult to read and understand. They render the process of disambiguation arduous by blurring the boundaries separating right from wrong, before from after, truth (or even earnest communication) from propaganda. Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that the historical present has produced a similarly difficult set of texts. The delusive riptide surrounding each reader only gets greater in magnitude as time passes. And so the critic must also get stronger, more limber of mind and intransigent of spirit. At minimum, they must read on, holding out for the complexity that is the text’s one sturdy truth, and any good critic’s saving grace.
To close out the event, a poet marshalled the room into a call-and-response reading of a poem from Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. “May it continue,” we all said, at every catch in the poet’s breath. I thought then of Cordelia’s timeless rebuttal to her father’s charge of ingratitude. The thin-skinned sovereign calls her “so young and so untender,” but both Cordelia and the reader know this is not the case. That shared knowledge is what makes Cordelia’s response both critically astute and immeasurably romantic: “So young, my lord, and true.”
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*An essay-review of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear. By Nan Z. Da. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025. 240 pp. $29.95. Thomas Dai is the 2026 Georgia Review Critic-at-Large.
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1. Per Idaho Senate Bill No. 1048, which took effect in my state on July 1, 2025, “DEI” shall be understood as “any trainings, programs, activities, or instruction designed or implemented in accordance with the tenets or concepts of critical theory, including but not limited to the concepts of unconscious or implicit bias, microaggressions, internalized racism, cultural appropriation, structural equity, settler colonialism, group marginalization, antiracism, systemic oppression, social justice, institutional or systemic racism, white fragility, racial privilege, disparate impact, intersectionality, sexual privilege, patriarchy, gender theory, queer theory, neopronouns, transgender ideology, misgendering, othering, deadnaming, heteronormativity, allyship, or any other related formulation of these tenets or concepts.” It is that last ominously open-ended phrase “any other related formulation” that turns this already long-winded list into an effortlessly replenishable word bank for right-wing speech moderators to wield against criticism and debate.
