A conversation with Virginia Jackson to discuss two of her published papers: “Specters of the Ballad” (Nineteenth Century Literature, 2016) and “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2015). The workshop will involve topics relevant to graduate student professionalization, including issues of craft and public-facing scholarship. Please reach out to Zoey Dorman (zdorman@umich.edu) or Talin Tahajian (talatahaj@umich.edu) to receive copies of the pre-circulated papers.

“This essay [‘Specters of the Ballad’] argues that Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ballad ‘The Haunted Oak’ (1901) indexes Dunbar’s invention of the modern American lyric through the (lynching) form of modern racism. How does race ghost-write poetry’s redefinition around the lyric? How does it create a dramatically abstract ‘speaker’ that gives voice to and for an imagined community? Dunbar inverts both romantic apostrophe and Victorian dramatic monologue and dialogue in his speaking bough. He does this by framing his poem as a pre-romantic border ballad, a tale of Scots rebellion and English law superimposed upon American racist violence. What Jacqueline Goldsby has dubbed ‘racism’s modern life form’ thus becomes modern American poetry’s life form, a lyricized poetic history haunted from root to branch.”

“‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ is part of part of the Los Angeles Review of Books special series ‘No Crisis’: a look at the state of critical thinking and writing—literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies—in the 21st century. Jackson reviews Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism.”