King Lear and Trump

Prof. Julian Lamb
Department of English

Both King Lear and Donald Trump might be said to rage against an inevitability: that human leaders, whether as a consequence of old age or an election, must eventually relinquish power. In this talk, I will attempt to shed light on one specific aspect of how the unwillingness to relinquish power takes shape: both individuals perform utterances that they do not have the authority to perform. Such utterances have the paradoxical character of posing as gestures of power which ultimately show, however, how little power the speaker actually has.