discussion question for April 26th

Posted on April 25, 2007

This is the last discussion question ... the collection of all your responses is due on the last day of class (along with the extended reflection on one of the responses OR the preface/cover letter to the collection as a whole; see Course Guidelines--listed under "syllabus" on the blog site--for submission instructions).

We'll be finishing up with Stanley Cavell's subtle reading of King Lear, "The Avoidance of Love" (e-reserve). As I have previously told you, rather than reading the entire piece, you can skip the intro (pp. 39-43) and section II (pp. 81-123) and just read section I (pp. 44-81). Obviously, we want to try to think through what he means by "the avoidance of love"; I should say that while his concept doesn't constitute some wild reading of the play, his examination does ask us to reconsider some of our basic assumptions (about, for example, who is a good character and who a villainous one). And there is definitely some overlap between Cavell's reading and Booth's discussion of "indefinition," at least in the context of how we assess the major characters of the play ... a point we started considering yesterday.

So the question is a follow up to our discussion of the play's opening scene (if you weren't in class, or if you need to rethink Booth's point, we were working through material discussed on pages 61 [very bottom] through 64 [very top] of his King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy). Cavell's essay is broken up into a discussion of what happens in the Gloucester-family subplot (Edgar / Edmund / Gloucester) followed by a discussion of the Lear-family mainplot (Lear and his daughters). On pg. 57, Cavell transitions to the latter with this statement: "We now have elements with which to begin an analysis of the most controversial of the Lear problems, the nature of Lear's motivation in his opening (abdication) scene. The usual interpretations follow one of three main lines [which Cavell briefly summarizes] ... My hypothesis will be that Lear's behavior in this scene is explained by--the tragedy begins because of--the same motivation which manipulates the tragedy throughout its course" ... and for Cavell this "motivation" is what he calls "the avoidance of love." So you are to briefly explain Cavell's understanding of "Lear's motivation in his opening (abdication) scene" in the context of Cavell's sense of how this "same motivation ... manipulates the tragedy throughout its course." In other words, what's going on in this opening scene, according to Cavell--obviously, we might want to compare / contrast this reading to Booth's notion of "indefinition"--and how does this opening provide a snapshot of the play's larger consideration of the tragic.