The Vienna Paradox is Marjorie Perloff's memoir of growing up in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to America in 1938 with her upper-middle-class, highly cultured, and largely assimilated Jewish family, and her self-transformation from the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz to the English-speaking Marjorie--who also happened to be the granddaughter of Richard Schüller, the Austrian foreign minister under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations. Compelling as the story is, this is hardly a conventional memoir. Rather, it interweaves biographical anecdote and family history with speculations on the historical development of early 20th-century Vienna as it was experienced by her parents' generation, and how the loss of their "high" culture affected the lives of these cultivated refugees in a democratic United States that was, and remains, deeply suspicious of perceived "elitism." This is, in other words, an intellectual memoir, both elegant and heartfelt, by one of America's leading critics, a narrative in which literary and philosophical reference is as central as the personal.

This volume examines the flourishing of Futurist aesthetics in the European art and literature of the early twentieth century. Futurism was an artistic and social movement that was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere. The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature. This work looks at the prose, visual art, poetry, and the manifestos of Futurists from Russia to Italy. The author reveals the Moment's impulses and operations, tracing its echoes through the years to the work of "postmodern" figures like Roland Barthes. This updated edition reexamines the Futurist Moment in the light of a new century, in which Futurist aesthetics seem to have steadily more to say to the present

Must poetic form be, as Yeats demanded, "full, sphere-like, single", or can it accommodate the "impurities" Yeats and his Modernist generation found so problematic? Sixty years later, these are still open questions, questions to which Marjorie Perloff addresses herself in the essays collected here. The first group of essays deals with Pound's own poetics as that poetics related to two of his great contemporaries, Stevens and Joyce, as well as to the visual arts of his day. The second group deals with the more technical aspects of verse and prose. In the last four essays, Perloff takes up broader issues, including the current pessimism about the state of poetry, and the work of experimental poets and conceptual poets.

How the negotiation between poetic and media discourses takes place is the subject of Marjorie Perloff's groundbreaking study. Radical Artifice considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the great Modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the Donahue "talk show," or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is John Cage, a "poet" better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, and one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, musical note, painted surface, or theoretical statement could ever again escape "contamination" from the media landscape in which we live. It is under his sign that Radical Artifice was composed.

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler{u2019}s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories{u2014}an 2Austro-Modernism3 that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus{u2019}s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti{u2019}s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein{u2019}s notebooks and Paul Celan{u2019}s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers

In Differentials, Perloff explores and defends her belief in the power of close reading, a strategy often maligned as reactionary in today's critical climate but which, when construed differentially, is vital, she believes, to any true understanding of a literary or poetic work, irrespective of how traditional or experimental it is. Perloff also examines key issues in modernism, from Eliot's conservative poetics and Pound's nominalism to translation theory (Wittgenstein, Eugene Jolas, Haroldo de Campos), and the contemporary avant garde, as represented by writers like Susan Howe, Tom Raworth, Rae Armantrout, Ron Silliman, Ronald Johnson, Caroline Bergvall, and Kenneth Goldsmith. Ultimately, Perloff's most important offerings in Differentials are her remarkably original reflections on the aesthetic process: on how poetry works, and what it means, in and for our time. --Publisher description

Selected interviews and essays of Marjorie Perloff, a well-known critic.