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This revisionist narrative of poetic change in the twentieth century challenges the accepted notions of what poetry is and can be in the new century and makes the case for the seminal place of poetry in contemporary culture.
List of contents
List of Plates.
Acknowledgments.
Introduction.
1 Avant-Garde Eliot.
2 Gertrude Stein's Differential Syntx.
3 The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp.
4 Khlebnikov's Soundscapes: Letter, Number, and the Poetics of Zaum.
5 "Modernism" at the Millennium.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index.
About the author
Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of numerous books, including
Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991),
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), and
Poetry On and Off the Page (1998). She is considered to be one of the most distinguished critics now writing on twentieth-century poetry and poetics.
Summary
Argues that it is only at the turn of the 21st century that the powerful lessons of the avant-garde - an avant-garde cruelly disrupted by the Great War and subsequent political upheavals - were learned. This book offers readings of T S Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Velimir Khlebnikov. It examines various related poetic concerns.
Report
"Perloff s newest work offers refreshingly frank, controversial, and even inspiring ideas ... Perloff s readings refuse to reaffirm orthodoxies, presenting innovative perspectives on poets, early modernism and its relation to the current scene. Far from being a reactionary call to return to the past, Perloff s work envisions a bold continuation of modernism s earlier revolutionary impulses. 21st-Century Modernism is vital and necessary reading for anyone interested in the history of modern poetry and where it is going." PN Review
"The book commands respect, [...], not only for its energy and the precision of its readings, but for its refusal to surrender powers of arbitration from the artist to the teacher or theorist." Times Literary Supplement
"The heart of [Perloff s] book is her enthusiasm - a well-researched and carefully argued enthusiasm" The Virginia Quarterly Review
