Almost Emily Dickinson (Clarendon Lecture 1 by Professor Teju Cole)

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. 

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 first lecture is on 'Almost Emily Dickinson' on 29 October at 5.30pm at the English Faculty, St Cross Building, Oxford. The lecture will be followed by a wine reception. 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

TEJU COLE is Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University. Among his books are the novels Open City and Tremor, the essay collections Known and Strange Things and Black Paper, and the photo-text works Blind Spot and Pharmakon. His work has been in fiction, photography, art history, and criticism, and he has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Windham-Campbell Prize, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other recognitions. He delivered the Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago in 2019, and the Finzi Contini Lecture at Yale University in 2024, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Photo by Donavon Smallwood