Book Reviews by Scott Challener
A Review of Frank Bidart's Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2009) for The Rumpus
A Review of Randall Jarrell's The Woman at Washington Zoo (Atheneum, 1961) for the National Book ... more A Review of Randall Jarrell's The Woman at Washington Zoo (Atheneum, 1961) for the National Book Foundation.
A review of William Bronk's Life Supports: New and Collected Poems (North Point Press, 1982) for ... more A review of William Bronk's Life Supports: New and Collected Poems (North Point Press, 1982) for the National Book Foundation.
A Review of Howard Moss's 1972 Selected Poems (Atheneum) for the National Book Foundation.
A Review of Theodore Roethke's Words for the Wind (1959, Doubleday) for the National Book Foundat... more A Review of Theodore Roethke's Words for the Wind (1959, Doubleday) for the National Book Foundation.
A review of William Meredith's Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (Triquarterly, 1997) for ... more A review of William Meredith's Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (Triquarterly, 1997) for the National Book Foundation.
Poems by Scott Challener
Drafts by Scott Challener
This paper offers a brief consideration of the literary ballad as a register of what by the mid-'... more This paper offers a brief consideration of the literary ballad as a register of what by the mid-'60s economists had diagnosed as " urban crisis " and in 1970 John Ashbery called " urban chaos. " I'm particularly interested in how poets used the ballad to see and see into the failures of the " spatio-temporal fix " of urban renewal. My general idea is that in the twentieth-century, as the formal properties and " barriers " of traditional ballads fragment and disperse, the non-modern attributes of the ballad—its orality, its structure of address, the performative, anonymous, narrative dimensions of popular song—appear embossed, lending the postmodern ballad's distortions a specifically comparative and institutional character. The ballad's historical transformation in the crucible of " print-capitalism " heightens this embossment: the broadside ballad especially can be understood as another of those forms that, in Benedict Anderson's terms, " provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation" by providing readers with a "complex gloss on the word 'meanwhile'. " By the somewhat incongruous term postmodern ballad, I mean to signal the transition from the modern to the postmodern that Frederic Jameson has described in terms of a " temporal sinking to a subordinate feature of space as such " and the shrinkage of time to the present. I see the postmodern ballad's distinctive responsiveness to crises of capital not only as embossment or register, but in the words of Gwendolyn Brooks, as a reckoning with " the not-old and with surprise " —a phrase that seems particularly apt to the lived experience of these crises.
This session's goal is to establish a critical ground from which to reassess the ballad in 20th a... more This session's goal is to establish a critical ground from which to reassess the ballad in 20th and 21st century poetry. Though the modern and contemporary ballad has received far less critical attention than in earlier periods, recent scholarship—Evie Shockley's analysis of racialized boundary conditions in African American Poetry (Renegade Poetics 2011), Stephen Newman's study of disciplinary boundary conditions in the New Critics' approach to the ballad (Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon 2007), Daniel Tiffany's work on the ballad and kitsch (My Silver Planet 2014), and Mike Chasar's examination of what we might call the corporate boundary conditions of the roadside ballad (Everyday Reading 2012), among others—suggests the time is ripe for such a reassessment. This scholarship not only lays out a comparative groundwork for rethinking the conditions and uses of the ballad, but also gestures to a remarkably diverse body of modern and contemporary experimental poems through which what Newman calls the " radioactive dye " of balladry runs. At the center of this session is the question of why this is so: why, of all forms, has the ballad been revived in this period? To answer this question, the prospective panelists also seek to answer others: What is the cultural work that the ballad performs? What interpretive frameworks best address this work? How should the ballad form be understood in relation to contemporary and historical poetics? These are some of the questions this session aims to address and open up for discussion. Rachel Blau Duplessis will begin the session with the premise that form and is versions are central to the poetic function of the ballad, particularly as it expresses psycho-social formation and engages historically specific debates (or burdens). She will consider work by African-American writers Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and by modern and contemporary women writers such as Helen Adam, Judy Grahn, Susan Howe, LeeAnn Brown, to speak to the ways in which modern and contemporary ballads draw on formal and rhetorical traditions. Her analysis will include properties of repetition, the ballad's speaking subjectivities, and its characteristic numerical play; she will also trace a genealogy of critical arguments about the strikingly lurid content of many ballads. By way of conclusion, Blau Duplessis will revisit Coleridge's hybrid work in order to turn briefly to her own practice in her own poetic work, Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss (2012). For Blau Duplessis, the question of what the ballad is good for—the work it specifically performs—seems to be answered at specific historical moments when "boundary-ness" is acutely felt as an insoluble cultural condition. Scott Challener will turn to how the ballads of contemporary black writers respond to institutional racism as one such insoluble cultural condition. Drawing on work by Harryette Mullen, Kevin Young, Nathaniel Mackey, and Terrance Hayes, Challener shows how these writers press the ballad into the project of rearticulating a vigorous hermeneutics of collective identity in institutional spaces where identification and personhood become possible—or are taken away. Challener also finds in this work a concomitant, self-reflexive questioning of in-and out-school racialized identities. He argues that these ballads imagine the institutional conditions for poetry as spatially extensive (moving outward) and fugitive (as flight), and at the same time situate the practice of balladry as a reckoning with how real institutional constraints on the present shape future meaning. Their use of the ballad stresses a poetics of limit—not only the
Papers by Scott Challener
Teaching Transatlanticism, 2015
Contemporary Literature, 2017
Here I am with an excellent job, writing rarely-(handling the rare books in a library. .. in (Har... more Here I am with an excellent job, writing rarely-(handling the rare books in a library. .. in (Harvard). .. in Boston. . .)-lonely as a kangaroo in an aquarium, and then you have to write about how on the other side of the country people are really alive, thinking significantly, getting drunk significantly, fucking significantly. You've upset my cold New England dream world.. .. In the words of Faust, you'll never read to me, "Weh! Weh! / Du hast sie zerstört, / Die schöne Welt". .. So, Mr John Allen Ryan, if you love me and have any friends that love me, start them searching for a place in San Francisco where I could be employed, anything from night-watchman in a museum to towel-boy in a Turkish bath.. .. This is a manifesto as well as a personal letter, broadcast its terms.
The Langston Hughes Review
This essay examines the reception and reinvention of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in ASK YOUR MAM... more This essay examines the reception and reinvention of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ. It argues that Hughes reconstitutes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in “Blues in Stereo”—the fifth section or “mood” of ASK YOUR MAMA—for the era of global decolonization. He does so by embracing jazz as the primary communicative context and mode of address. Hughes's effort illuminates the uneasy tensions that animate the book's differential address to black and white US readerships as well as to readers outside of the U.S. and the Anglophone world. The tensions internal to Hughes's final book-length poem owe their existence to contradictions that Hughes and his contemporaries wrestled with in the period; namely, that the articulation of the possibilities for black internationalist solidarity made them vulnerable to technological “capture” by the culture industry and the State Department. By reflecting on its status as a text mediated both by jazz and by te...
This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present.... more This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa's foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and afterlives of this body of work in more recent literature, including Moraga's "Mexican Medea," The Hungry Woman, and Sara Uribe's Antígona González, as well as several novels--Carmen Boullosa's Texas: The Great Theft, Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Valeria Luiselli's The Lost Children Archive. We'll also spend significant time with contemporary poets, including Daniel Borzutzky, Juan Felipe Herrera, Valerie Martínez, Wendy Trevino, and Javier Zamora. How does this literature understand the changing dynamics of what scholar John Alba Cutler calls "the new border," a zone def...
This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the last two decades. We wi... more This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the last two decades. We will concentrate our attention on how contemporary art works represent and participate in the upheavals of the twenty-first century—9/11, global economic and ecological crisis, mass migration and mass deportation, political and social mobilization, state repression, neoliberalization, border conflict, and the transformation of mass media. We will examine specific literary and cultural objects—novels, poems, plays, shows, performance art, painting, music—and the historical antagonisms that animate them. We will investigate the cultural work these objects and their authors perform. How do they project, embrace, and constitute the conflicting meanings of Latinx life today? How do they contravene, suppress, or refuse certain fantasies of the "Latin"? We will address questions about race and racialization, gender and sexuality, and assimilation and transculturation, as well as about t...
Contemporary Literature, 2017
This dissertation explores how the evolution of twentieth-century U.S. literature was shaped by t... more This dissertation explores how the evolution of twentieth-century U.S. literature was shaped by the reception of Spanish and Latin American poetry. I argue that midcentury poets embraced the diverse structures of poetic address they encountered in the Latin American anthology in order to remake the unit of the poem and the linguistic and structural boundaries of the single book-length volume. Poets such as Jack Spicer, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, and Kenneth Koch adopted the anthology as a creative model that foregrounded the circulation and mutation of discursive contexts, and underscored a pointed indifference to the integrity of the book. From the Outside thus assembles an unusual cast of major and lesser-known poets whose address to various publics belies conventional affiliations of coterie and community as well as narratives that organize postwar American poetry under the master signs of lyric, nation, institution, or Cold War cultural politics.Anthologies and translations, and especially anthologies of translations, remain understudied today. Literary scholarship tends to regard these objects as derivative, staid documents of canon, movement, ideology, or period. Yet midcentury translation anthologies were neither politically conservative nor formally stable; as objects of study, they reveal a field of multiplicity involved in the complex process of re-organizing itself. While they granted a measure of access to the multilingual poetry of the Americas, anthologies of translations also staged a confrontation with the limits of monolingual address. This confrontation exposed a persistent tension between two competing models of poetry's communicability: one premised on circulation within communities; the other, on circulation beyond them. This tension surfaces as a dialectical push-and-pull between lyric communication and its primary modality, direct address, and non-lyric modes of address oriented to a more heterogeneous range of publics. This drama unfolds at an historical moment when the proliferati [...]
Yesterday taught her to contrive to dreg-up and to thoroughlize.-Fitting her for Some reckonings ... more Yesterday taught her to contrive to dreg-up and to thoroughlize.-Fitting her for Some reckonings With the not-old and with surprise.-Gwendolyn Brooks, "My Mother" (1975) This paper offers a brief consideration of the literary ballad as a register of what by the mid-'60s economists had diagnosed as "urban crisis" and in 1970 John Ashbery called "urban chaos." i I'm particularly interested in how poets used the ballad to see and see into the failures of the "spatio-temporal fix" of urban renewal. ii My general idea is that in the twentieth-century, as the formal properties and "barriers" iii of traditional ballads fragment and disperse, the nonmodern attributes of the ballad-its orality, its structure of address, the performative, anonymous, narrative dimensions of popular song-appear embossed, lending the postmodern ballad's distortions a specifically comparative and institutional character. The ballad's historical transformation in the crucible of "print-capitalism" heightens this embossment: the broadside ballad especially can be understood as another of those forms that, in Benedict Anderson's terms, "provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation" by providing readers with a "complex gloss on the word 'meanwhile'." iv By the somewhat incongruous term postmodern ballad, I mean to signal the transition from the modern to the postmodern that Frederic Jameson has described in terms of a "temporal sinking to a subordinate feature of space as such" and the shrinkage of time to the present. v I see the postmodern ballad's distinctive responsiveness to crises of capital not only as embossment or register, but in the words of Gwendolyn Brooks, as a reckoning with "the not-old and with surprise"-a phrase that seems particularly apt to the lived experience of these crises. vi That said,
This course is a study of American literature's address to and engagement with the hemisphere... more This course is a study of American literature's address to and engagement with the hemisphere in the long nineteenth century. As such, it is first and foremost an inquiry into the concepts—"America," "literature," "address," "hemisphere," race and period—that animate our study. Our first task, then, is to turn these concepts into problems. What constitutes American literature in this period? What are the conditions of its production, circulation, and reception? To what, and to whom, is it addressed? Who are its readers, its publics, its characters, its addressees? Who are its legitimators, authorities, and apologists? The course is arranged around major transformations in hemispheric relations, including the invocation and exercise of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the annexation of Texas, the U.S. Mexican War (1846-1848), the Treaty of Guadeloupe (1848), U.S. expansionism before and after the Spanish American War (1898), the construction and administration of the Panama Canal Zone (1903-1914), and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). We conclude with a look at the hemispheric contexts of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Book Reviews by Scott Challener
Poems by Scott Challener
Drafts by Scott Challener
Papers by Scott Challener