- 55
- 211 690
Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON
United States
เข้าร่วมเมื่อ 26 มิ.ย. 2020
My name is Ato Quayson and I am a Professor of English and Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. Here are my reflections on the relevance of the humanities at the present time. Even though I shall be delving from time to time into art, film, history, philosophy, etc, my main focus will mainly be on literature. I propose to share with you many ideas deriving from how we read literature. I am a comparatist at heart and much of what I will talk about, even if starting from the perspective of a particular text, will wade far and wide to bring in examples from other traditions of writing. I have three main areas of interest: Literature, Cities, and Fashion and you will find me threading these into many of the episodes I will be sharing with you every week. They will cover various themes, including: Tragedy in World Literature; the City in Literature; Literature and Ethical Judgment, and Diaspora and Literature, among various others.
Disability and Literature: Introduction
This is the introduction to a new series on Disability and Literature. While the aging process typically comes with different forms of both physical and cognitive impairments, it is also true that many families all over the world live with family members that suffer different kinds of disability, such as mobility impairment, autistic spectrum disorders, cognitive disorders, and various forms of debilitating diseases that have either been inherited from their family or otherwise got through chance and accident. This generates both suffering as well as great acts of courage on the part of those families. The ways in which forms of disability have been depicted in literature and film will be the subject of this series and will touch on a range of writers such as Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, Mark Haddon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Chinua Achebe, among various others. In this episode we will be exploring a brief history of disability studies and the ways in which scholars in the field have moved debates on impairment and disability from the medical model to the social model of disability studies.
Suggested Reading
Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupatios and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998)
Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Henri-Jacques Stiker’s A History of Disability, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press,1999)
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2001).
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, (London: Verso, 1995).
Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004)
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, (New York: NYU Press, 1996).
Tom Shakespeare, The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives, (London: Cassell Publishers, 1998).
Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
Suggested Reading
Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupatios and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998)
Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Henri-Jacques Stiker’s A History of Disability, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press,1999)
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2001).
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, (London: Verso, 1995).
Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004)
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, (New York: NYU Press, 1996).
Tom Shakespeare, The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives, (London: Cassell Publishers, 1998).
Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
มุมมอง: 133
วีดีโอ
JUNOT DÍAZ'S The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Magical Realism and the Tragic Intertext
มุมมอง 48721 วันที่ผ่านมา
The narrative of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a family saga strung across different generations of the Cabral Leons as well as across different geographical locations: Oscar, Lola, Belicia, La Inca, and Abelard are the key dramatis personae, and the main events of the novel shuttle between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. There are two connections between the family saga and th...
PEPETELA'S The Return of the Water Spirit: Magical Realism as Mystery Thriller
มุมมอง 6928 วันที่ผ่านมา
Unlike other African magical realist texts we have seen, Pepetela’s The Return of the Water Spirit, marries magical realism to elements of the mystery thriller. The story is set in a period just after Angola’s violent civil wars in 2002, when the earlier communist government is transforming itself into a post-war capitalist bureaucratic regime. The main realist emphasis in the story is placed o...
BEN OKRI'S The Famished Road: Leakages and Transpositions
มุมมอง 114หลายเดือนก่อน
This episode will focus on the ontological leakages and transpositions in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. To turn from What the Crow Said that we encountered in our previous episode The Famished Road is to be forced into a major readjustment regarding the primary sources for magical realism. From the Africanist perspective represented by the Nigerian Ben Okri, magical realism turns on forms of Af...
ROBERT KROETSCH'S, What the Crow Said: Ontological Juxtapositions and Proliferations
มุมมอง 103หลายเดือนก่อน
As we have seen in our episodes on Amos Tutuola and Lauren Buekes the depiction of interspecies ontology and the blurring of boundaries becomes a central device for establishing the equivalence between the fantastic and the real that defines magical realism. A contrastive handling of the blurring of boundaries between the human and the animal/insect worlds is provided in Robert Kroetsch’s What ...
LAUREN BUEKES' Zoo City: Animals, Muti, and Transformation
มุมมอง 117หลายเดือนก่อน
Today’s episode will focus on Lauren Buekes’s Zoo City. The novel starts off by being an exploration of the idea and principles of the mashavi, or the animalled. Several theories of aposymbiosis are proffered and the novel appears to be centered mainly on that. Aposymbiosis when two different species live independently of each other but is each affected by the life cycle of the other. This is i...
Theoretical Interregnum: Chronotopes, Indexicality, and Iconicity in Magical Realism
มุมมอง 202หลายเดือนก่อน
This episode is a theoretical interregnum that will focus on showing how the principle of equivalence between the fantastic and the real in magical realism also turns specifically on the constitution of space and time, both in terms of the conflation or juxtaposition of different chronotopes and ontologies of space-time and of the transposition or leakage of different spatio-temporal categories...
SALMAN RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN: OF FORGETTING AND RE-MEMBERING
มุมมอง 3842 หลายเดือนก่อน
This episode will focus on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. We will see how Rushdie places questions of narrative perspective and narration at the center of his mode of magical realism. Unlike Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Allende’s The House of Spirits, the reader is persistently invoked by the novel as an implied interlocutor inside of the novel itself, either in the person...
ISABEL ALLENDE'S THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS: MAGICAL REALISM AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
มุมมอง 2462 หลายเดือนก่อน
This episode will focus on the relationship between class consciousness and magical realism in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Allende’s novel centers on an inter-generational family saga, this time of the Trueba family. But unlike Marquez’s novel there are extraordinary cycles of political violence from outside the family as well as pers...
GABRÍEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S One Hundred Years of Solitude: Devices and Themes
มุมมอง 5302 หลายเดือนก่อน
In this episode we will be looking at some devices and themes in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. We will see that his brand of magical realism is an amalgam of different narrative techniques and that he combines them in such a way as to create a partly humorous and partly tragic reflection on Latin American history. Suggested Reading Gerald Martin, Gabríel García Márquez...
Magical Realism and History in GABRÍEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S One Hundred Years of Solitude
มุมมอง 6102 หลายเดือนก่อน
In this episode we will be looking at Gabríel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, considered one of the best examples of magical realism in world literature. We shall see in the novel how Marquez mixes various fantastic motifs from biblical and Greek mythology and The Thousand and One Nights to provide a lively resource base for his brand of ...
AMOS TUTUOLA's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Inter-Species Ontologies
มุมมอง 4233 หลายเดือนก่อน
In this episode we will be focusing on Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Tutuola draws upon Yoruba traditions for his novella. In the Yoruba tradition, the bush or forest is taken to be the domain of extreme uncertainty and trials that form a contrast to the settled communities of villages and towns. The bush was traditionally the place that established the credentials of the hunter...
What is MAGICAL REALISM?
มุมมอง 1.2K3 หลายเดือนก่อน
This episode will be focused on providing a definition of magical realism. Magical realism is a mode of writing that sets up a scrupulous equivalence between the fantastical and the real. The ways in which this equivalence is established varies from text to text, but generally aims at eliminating any surprise or alarm by the appearance of fantastic alongside realistic details. Furthermore, the ...
Announcing Magical Realism
มุมมอง 9803 ปีที่แล้ว
Critic.Reading.Writing is taking a break for the month of May but we will return in June with a series of episodes on Magical Realism. Apart from defining what we mean by the term magical realism, the series will include the works of Amos Tutuola, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Lauren Beuke, Toni Morrison and Laura Esquivel. Thank you for your support of our c...
REVIEW of URBAN STUDIES and SPATIAL THEORY
มุมมอง 1.6K3 ปีที่แล้ว
This week’s episode will be a review of previous episodes we have shared on concepts in urban studies and spatial theories. The principle that space is not a container but a symptom and producer of social relations is central to urban studies. Concepts such as chronotopes, spatial traversal, and means of locomotion will be explored as vantage points from which to interpret urban space and the i...
TONI MORRISON, Jazz: Harlem, Jazz, and Narrative Counterpoints
มุมมอง 2.1K3 ปีที่แล้ว
TONI MORRISON, Jazz: Harlem, Jazz, and Narrative Counterpoints
JAMES BALDWIN, “Sonny’s Blues”: Rapture and the Ambient Menace
มุมมอง 1.8K3 ปีที่แล้ว
JAMES BALDWIN, “Sonny’s Blues”: Rapture and the Ambient Menace
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ, Midaq Alley: Space and Historical Constriction
มุมมอง 2.4K3 ปีที่แล้ว
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ, Midaq Alley: Space and Historical Constriction
BLACK PANTHER and the Question of Black Atlantic Melancholy
มุมมอง 1K3 ปีที่แล้ว
BLACK PANTHER and the Question of Black Atlantic Melancholy
DOCTOR STRANGE AND THE MATRIX: The Geometries of Space and Time
มุมมอง 3603 ปีที่แล้ว
DOCTOR STRANGE AND THE MATRIX: The Geometries of Space and Time
FISTON MWANZA MUJILA, TRAM 83: Jazz Variations and Postcolonial Critique
มุมมอง 1.1K3 ปีที่แล้ว
FISTON MWANZA MUJILA, TRAM 83: Jazz Variations and Postcolonial Critique
THE RAILWAY STATION CHRONOTOPE in the Bourne Ultimatum
มุมมอง 6173 ปีที่แล้ว
THE RAILWAY STATION CHRONOTOPE in the Bourne Ultimatum
WALTER MOSLEY’s Devil in a Blue Dress: Race, Noir, and Social Critique
มุมมอง 9133 ปีที่แล้ว
WALTER MOSLEY’s Devil in a Blue Dress: Race, Noir, and Social Critique
THE SIGN OF FOUR: A Postcolonial Reading of Sherlock Holmes
มุมมอง 6953 ปีที่แล้ว
THE SIGN OF FOUR: A Postcolonial Reading of Sherlock Holmes
SPATIAL ANALYSIS: The Airport as Chronotope
มุมมอง 3.5K3 ปีที่แล้ว
SPATIAL ANALYSIS: The Airport as Chronotope
The AFRO-BRAZILIANS of ACCRA, 1836-Present Times
มุมมอง 6K3 ปีที่แล้ว
The AFRO-BRAZILIANS of ACCRA, 1836-Present Times
WHAT IS URBAN STUDIES?: A View from Oxford Street, Accra
มุมมอง 1.5K3 ปีที่แล้ว
WHAT IS URBAN STUDIES?: A View from Oxford Street, Accra
WHAT IS INTERDISCIPLINARITY? : A View from the Humanities
มุมมอง 2.7K4 ปีที่แล้ว
WHAT IS INTERDISCIPLINARITY? : A View from the Humanities
WOLE SOYINKA's Death and the King's Horseman: Tragedy and Ritual Drama
มุมมอง 17K4 ปีที่แล้ว
WOLE SOYINKA's Death and the King's Horseman: Tragedy and Ritual Drama
excited for this series! & thank you for talking about this topic
You're so welcome!
Tnank you professor. I enjoy your TH-cam videos as I always learn a lot.
Hello sir, I hope this message finds you well. I am currently working on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Brick Lane by Monica Ali for my thesis. I have found your analysis highly relevant to some of the ideas I am exploring. With your permission, I would like to reference some of the critiques discussed in your summary. Thank you for your valuable insights. I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks prof
thank you so much!
You're welcome!
Thank you prof.
You are welcome.
Thank you Prof.
Thanks to you too.
WOOWW, Thank you so much for this summary
You are most welcome.
Wonderful Professor.
Another wonderful episode on one of my favourite books.
Many thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Thank you prof.
You are welcome
Really excellent.
Many thanks, Robert.
Great session Prof 🔥
Glad you liked it!
Thank you Prof.
Thank you, Prof!
Thanks to you too, Edmund.
Thank you Prof.
Thanks to you too, Emmanuel.
Good analyze thanks
Thanks.
I love that, beautiful ending...Paolo Coelho, boho biem! ...the real difficulty is in choosing well your own madness...😅
Thanks for taking some of us gratefully back to the classroom to listen to such powerful pieces😊
My pleasure, Poetic.
Thank you prof.
Informative summary and analysis. Thanks Prof.
Many thanks to you too.
Could you please make an episode about Coetzee?
Thank you prof.
Hello Prof, at some point, I think you should consider Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons, too.
Will do.
Thank you Prof.
Holy moly I’m saving this one!
Looking forward to the next episode
Thank you Prof.
Always incredible listening to you Prof🔥
Tutuola is of great interest to me and his contribution to morality in fantasy literature.
Lauren Beukes mentioned. Win!
There is a forthcoming episode on Buekes in the series.
We still learning from you. Prof
Don’t take too long doc. This is really brilliant
Many thanks.
Excellent linkage between the two novels and a clear explaination of the imperialist background that is drawn from the Caribbean and which influences Victorian attitudes in England towards the colonised "other".
Welcome back Prof.
Thanks.
Welcome back Prof.
Thanks.
yessss we have missed youuuuu!!! thanks for coming back
I have missed you all too!
Good to have you back.
Thanks.
well done, prof. great to see you.
Thanks.
Thank you very much for this episode, Prof. Quayson!
You are most welcome.
I have been looking forward to this episode! Thank you, Prof Quayson😁
Many thanks.
So great to hear this reading of the exchange between credulous Berthe (who is slowly realising she has been tricked) and the worldly and pragmatic Christophine. Would recommend anyone to read Jean Rhys's other works - notably the short stories (all of them), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Voyage in the Dark - they are just astonishing.
Conrad was selling books to English readers. I wish he had taken sides but he chose not to. I’m not a fan of his work because I don’t think he’s a great craftsman.
I loved this book!
This talk provides insights into the pioneering importance and limits of Heart of Darkness, a profoundly psychologically engrossing and disturbing piece of literature.
Great! giving thanks all the way from the University of Pretoria, South Africa
Thank you. Exquisite summary and related elements from the beginning to the ending of the story.
Brilliant lecture, Professor. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.
🎉❤thank you very much, please can l get your email for further interaction because l am doing a project on this book
Please, how can we study sounds inside the novel? Musicality is it one of the strategies used by Toni Morrison?