Teju Cole to Give 2024-2025 Clarendon Lectures

The 2024-2025 Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford will be given by Professor Teju Cole on October 29th and 31st and November 5th and 7th, 2024 on the topic of "Understatement." The lectures will take place at the English Faculty, St Cross Building at 5.30pm. All welcome; no booking required. 

"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."

-Teju Cole

Read more here.