Lecture Title: Law, Justice and Love: The Tragic Connotation of King Lear
Speaker: Professor Feng Wei
Lecture Time: 2:00 pm, December 10th, 2021 (Friday)
Tencent Meeting: 454 509 706
Organizer: College of Foreign Studies
Graduate Work Department
"Foreign Language+" Graduate Students Academic Exchange Center for Interdisciplinary Integration
Introduction to the Speaker: Feng Wei is a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor in the English Department of the College of Foreign Languages of Northeast Normal University, a Doctor of Literature from Peking University, a Fulbright Research Scholar from Yale University, and a communication review expert from the National Social Science Fund of China and the Chinese Academic Translation Project. He is mainly engaged in the teaching and research of Shakespeare's dramas and Renaissance English dramas. Representative work: The Confusion of Shylock: Shakespeare and Early Modern British Legal Thought (Peking University Press, 2017).
Content of the Lecture: King Lear is the darkest of all Shakespeare's tragic works. The death of Cordelia at the end of the play even made Dr. Samuel Johnson, the 18th century British literary giant, unable to bear to read it for several days. However, the question we need to answer is: What is the psychological motivation for King Lear to conduct the "test of love"? Why did Cordelia's "answer" (or refusal to answer?) make King Lear furious? Why did Cordelia die? Did King Lear gain wisdom, spiritual growth, or religious redemption after experiencing all the hardships? The lecture will start with the three main themes of law, justice, and love in the play, and provide a glimpse into the tragic connotation of King Lear.
