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On Leave: 2008-2009
Assistant Professor, English, Creative Writing, and the College
Walker 515
jscape at uchicago dot edu
Jennifer Scappettone’s research and teaching interests comprise 19th-century through contemporary writing, with particular emphases on comparative modernism; the history and presence of the avant-garde; geographies of modernity and current transmogrifications of “place”; literatures of travel and displacement; barbarism, anachronism, and polylingualism; translation; Italian culture and its reflection or echo in others; feminist theory and praxis; relations between literary and other arts; and art history, visual culture, and aesthetics. Her current critical work, broadly conceived, explores writing’s response to modernizing and passing urban environments, while stressing that literature is itself a built (and entropic) environment. It likewise limns the traffic between artistic production and the transmission of history.
Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in Venice
Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Yale University
She is working on a critical book, Venice and the Digression of the Modern, which shifts the gaze of modernist criticism away from Paris and toward an anachronistic haunt, exhausted of authority as a republic, yet very much alive to modern authors as an interpretive site: Venice, tourist capital of the 19th and 20th centuries. Dead but irrepressible, post-Romantic Venice formed a crucible for modernist values because its topography and cultural heritage seemed to embody all that prevailing models of progress needed to pathologize and suppress: the fluid, the feminine, the domestic, the foreign, the “Oriental,” the decadent—characteristics spurned in the Futurist manifesto “Against Passéist Venice.” The book argues that an aesthetic and amorous pause along the defunct Grand Tour, at the site of the “corpse politic” of Venice, offered modern artist-expatriates from ascendant nation-states a living and material example out of which they might imagine alternatives to Enlightenment conceptions of history. Venice’s putrefying yet lasting lagoon monuments and the texts they provoke still resist the shelving of Venice’s past as well as the city’s present imperative to reify the romance of its own decay; studying them has led her to emergent projects on ambient literature and lyric historiography.
As a poet and translator, she is committed to live and living literature, hands-on approaches to culture, and experiments in aesthetic collectivity. Her first book of poems, From Dame Quickly, will be out in 2008 from Litmus Press; several chapbooks are to be printed in 2007. She is at work on Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups, commissioned by Atelos Press. She is guest-editing Aufgabe 7, devoted to emergent Italian poetics; her translations from the Italian “Babeling deeply felt” of the postwar poet Amelia Rosselli are being collected as a book called Locomotrix.
She has taught courses on modernism, realism and the “abracadabrant” word, radical documentary, media aesthetics, obsolescence and sentimentality, nostalgia and utopia, city and country, urban zones of modernity, poetry and poetics, verse and prose writing, and the relations between literature and film.
Venice and the Digressive Invention of the Modern, a study of an unlikely crucible for modernism—the fallen lagoon Republic of Venice—and the prose and poetics that it enabled (by John Ruskin, Henry James, Ezra Pound, F.T. Marinetti, and contemporary artists)
Exit 43, a cross-operatic account of posturbanity, for Atelos Press
Locomotrix: Selected Poems of Amelia Rosselli, translations from Italian
J. M. W. Turner, Venetian Festival (1845)
Courtesy of the Tate Gallery
Criticism:
“Site Surfeit: Office for Soft Architecture Makes the City Confess,” Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (Spring 2006)
“Utopia Interrupted: Archipelago as Structure in A Draft of XXX Cantos,” PMLA 122:1 (January 2007)
“‘Più mOndo i: tUtti!’: Traffics of Historicism in Jackson Mac Low’s Contemporary Lyricism,” Modern Philology 105:1 (August 2007): forthcoming
“Bachelorettes, Even: Strategic Embodiment in Current Aesthetic Experiment by Women,” Modern Philology 105:1 (August 2007): forthcoming
Reviews:
of Marjorie Welish’s The Annotated ‘Here’ and Selected Poems, Boston Review 26:6 (Dec-Jan 2001-2)
of Norma Cole’s Spinoza in Her Youth, Poetry Project Newsletter 190 (Summer 2002)
of Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Boston Review 27:3 (Summer 2002)
of Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy, Boston Review 28:3 (Summer 2003)
of Jonah Siegel’s Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, & the Art-Romance Tradition, Modern Philology (forthcoming 2007)
Poetry:
From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, forthcoming 2008)
Beauty (Is the New Absurdity) (dusi/e kollectiv, 2007)
Abluvion Almanac[k] (Outside Voices, forthcoming 2007)
Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007)
Anthologies: Zoland Annual (Random House, forthcoming 2008), Viz Inter-Arts Event: A Trans-Genre Anthology (University of California, Santa Cruz, 2007), The 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets (Outside Voices, forthcoming), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab, 2007), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), War and Peace, Volumes II and III (O Books, 2005, 2007), The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner, 2004), Enough (O Books, 2003)
Journals: Counterpath Online, Dusie, GAMMM, 2nd Avenue Poetry, Aufgabe, The Brooklyn Rail, Drunken Boat, FourSquare, P-Queue, Model Homes, The Canary, Phoebe, Chain, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Commonweal, 580 Split, 26, Five Fingers Review, Xantippe, Volt, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, The Poker, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boston Review
Translations from Italian:
GAMMM, Zoland Annual, The Brooklyn Rail, Circumference, Bombay Gin, Mid-American Review, The American Poetry Review, and guest-editorship of the 2008 issue of Aufgabe
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 2005. Teaching at Chicago since 2006.
Still from Summertime, with Katharine Hepburn
Courtesy of David Lean by Stephen M. Silverman (1989)
Department of English
The University of Chicago
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Office: Walker 515
Phone: (773) 702-7999
Fax: (773) 702-2495
jscape at uchicago dot edu