Ato Quayson: Suffering and Tragedy from the Greeks to Toni Morrison

In this lecture Professor Quayson proffers working definitions of suffering and tragedy drawing first on the violent disagreements in the history of tragedy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to more modern tragedies and on the relationship of these violent disagreements to different forms of historical transition.
Quayson also explores the fraught individual processes of self-production in different historical epochs and the ambiguation of attitudes to individual and collective pasts that are the outcomes of these transitions. The lecture draws on examples from a wide range of traditions and cultures but will settle on the works of Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison to anchor the main terms of the argument.
Professor of English A. Van Jordan is the respondent to the talk.
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Ato Quayson is the Chair of the Department of English and the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at Stanford. He studied for his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana and took his Ph. D. from the University of Cambridge after which he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford before returning to Cambridge to become Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature in the Faculty of English from 1995-2005. He was also Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Fellow of Pembroke College while at Cambridge. Prior to Stanford he was Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University (2017-2019) and Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto (2005-2017). In 2016 he was appointed University Professor at the University of Toronto, the highest distinction that the university can bestow.
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A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W. W. Norton & Co. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). His forthcoming book, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, will be released in June of 2023 (W. W. Norton & Co). He served as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Literature at The University of Michigan, and he is currently a Professor in the Department of English at Stanford University.