The 2024-2025 Clarendon Lectures will be given by Professor Teju Cole (Harvard University) on 29, 31 October and 5, 7 November 2024 on the topic of UNDERSTATEMENT.

Abstract: Across these four lectures, I will be considering understatement in the poems of Emily Dickinson, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Layli Long Soldier. The potency of understatement has been remarked on for specific literary texts, but usually not as a general quality deserving of its own critical attention. Understatement is a resonant affective device that overlaps intriguingly with montage, elision, silence, unfinishedness, irony, and oracle. It sidesteps elaboration, generates humor, employs double negation, and conveys complaint. Its relationship to hyperbole is mischievous.

I come to this work as a novelist, critic, and photographer, and my lectures will be informed both by practical experience and by a long-standing interest in creative constraint. In my close readings of these poets, I will also be drawing on the laconic modes and near-minimalisms of a number of other artists.

The third lecture is on 'Dilation Dark Absorbs: On Kay Ryan' on 5 November at 5.30pm at the English Faculty, St Cross Building, Oxford. No booking required; seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

All lectures in the series: Lecture 1 (29 October): Almost Emily Dickinson Lecture 2 (31 October): Tissue of Echoes: On W.S. Merwin Lecture 3 (5 November): Dilation Dark Absorbs: On Kay Ryan Lecture 4 (7 November): Layli Long Soldier’s Intermission