Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I thank my teachers Shoshana Felman and Paul Fry for their warm and generous support throughout my graduate work, when I wrote my dissertation on Keats and Flaubert, and for their encouragement in the writing of this present book. Shoshana Felman continues to inspire me with the integrity, courage, and power of her intellectual example, and her work never ceases to open up for me new paths of reading and thinking. Paul Fry has enriched my literary education immeasurably with the erudition and subtlety of his thinking about lyric poetry, and continues to raise new interpretive possibilities for me in his writing and questioning. This book has benefited greatly from his comments. Geoffrey Hartman’s lessons retain for me, as for so many of his students, the distinct preeminence of a renovating virtue. Bill Pritchard’s teaching and friendship have accompanied me like a treasured gift for many years. I thank the friends and colleagues who helped me during the writing of this book. Eyal Peretz has been a superlatively stimulating interlocutor and the source of crucial comments at every step of the process. Brian McGrath read the manuscript in its entirety and gave me invaluably sensitive feedback . Ulrich Baer, Chimène Bateman, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ludovico Geymonat , Margaret Maurer, and Janet McAdams each read chapters and provided crucial suggestions. Ulrich Baer encouraged and inspired me to write on photography. I have enjoyed illuminating conversations about Wordsworth with Emily Rohrbach, who invited me to present a chapter as a talk at Hamilton College. With his typical acumen, Irad Kimhi provided a clutch formulation at a key moment. Various colleagues in the Department of English at Colgate University offered advice and support throughout the development of this project. I have benefited from conversations with Susan Cerasano about Lear, and with Jennifer Brice about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Lynn Staley has been all that one could wish for in a senior colleague and mentor, and has shown me, on so many levels, the way of the scholar. Connie Harsh and Deborah Knuth-Klenck deserve thanks ix x Acknowledgments for tirelessly fielding my questions over the years and for their consistent encouragement of my work. The Colgate University Research Council offered assistance in the form of a Major Grant at an early stage of this project. Part of chapter 4 was published as ‘‘From the Division of Labor to the Transformation of the Common: James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’’ in Figurationen: Gender, Literatur, Kultur 2 (2006): 33–52, in a special issue titled ‘‘The Ends of Photography,’’ edited by Ulrich Baer. I acknowledge Helen Tartar for her dedicated support of my work and for all her efforts in bringing this book to fruition. I thank my friends May Chen, Maria Ting, Michael Fei, and Vera and Ava Fei for being my home away from home, my family away from family. Diti Almog has been a great pal and a genuine source of strength. Carolyn Guile has kept me in spirited company. Finally, I thank my family. This book would not have been possible without the loving support of Edward Sun, Raymond Sun, and Alice Tsai Yu, and it is indebted to the hopes and dreams of the late Chi-Chung Yu. This book owes the most profound debt to my mother, Alice Yu—I dedicate it to her. S U C C E E D I N G K I N G L E A R ...