Assistant Professor, Department of English, Creative Writing, and the College
Walker 515
jscape at uchicago dot edu

Jennifer Scappettone’s research and teaching interests comprise nineteenth-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 study, This Amphibious City:  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 nineteenth and twentieth 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 to projects on ambient aesthetics 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.

Teaching interests and past courses include new approaches to modernism, realism and the “abracadabrant” word, radical documentary, obsolescence and sentimentality, nostalgia and utopia, city and country, urban zones of modernity, the poetics of dislocation, senses of the past, poetry and poetics, verse and prose writing, and media aesthetics.

J. M. W. Turner, Venetian Festival (1845) Courtesy of the Tate Gallery

CRITICISM:

“Versus Seamlessness: Architectonics of Pseudocomplicity in Tan Lin’s Ambient Poetics,” boundary 2 36:3 (Fall 2009), special issue on poetry after 1975, forthcoming

“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)

“Bachelorettes, Even:  Strategic Embodiment in Contemporary Experimentalism by Women” (response to Jennifer Ashton), Modern Philology 105:1 (August 2007)

“Accommodated, Unaccommodated Man, and Daughter:  Adapting Home in Moby-Dick and Moby Dick,” online catalog essay on the work of Guy Ben-Ner for the Smart Museum’s Adaptation: Video Installations by Ben-Ner, Herrera, Sullivan, and Sussman & The Rufus Corporation, May 2008

POETRY:

Author page at PennSound

From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009)
Belladonna Elders Series #5:  Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, featuring work by Scappettone, Etel Adnan, and Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna, 2009)
Ode oggettuale/Thing Ode (La Camera Verde, 2008)
Beauty (Is the New Absurdity) (dusi/e kollectiv, 2007)
Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007)

In progress:  Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups, for Atelos Press;
Neosuprematist Webtexts, featured at Infusoria

Anthologies:  Zoland Annual (Random House, 2008), Viz Inter-Arts Event:  A Trans-Genre Anthology (University of California, Santa Cruz, 2007), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab, 2007), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), War and Peace, Volumes II, III, and IV (O Books, 2005, 2007, forthcoming), 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, 26, P-Queue, Model Homes, Chain, The Poker, Boston Review, FourSquare, The Canary, Phoebe, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Commonweal, 580 Split, Five Fingers Review, Xantippe, Volt, Wild Orchids:  A Journal of Devotional Criticism

TRANSLATION:

Guest editor, Aufgabe 7, featuring work by 13 contemporary Italian poets and several critical pieces (2008)

In progress:  translations from the Italian of Amelia Rosselli, featured in Washington Square, GAMMM, Zoland Annual, The Brooklyn Rail, Circumference, Bombay Gin, Mid-American Review, American Poetry Review

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)