Marjorie Perloff on ‘Unoriginal Genius’

Celebrated literary critic Marjorie Perloff, PhD, a Visiting Hurst Professor in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will present a lecture titled “Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century” at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 14.

The talk — adapted from the opening chapter of her forthcoming book of the same title — will examine the practices of allusion and quotation in modern poetry.

In addition, Perloff will conduct a seminar on “Language in Migration: Multilingualism and Exophonic Writing in the New Poetics” from 11:45 a.m.-1 p.m. Thursday, April 15.

Both events are free and open to the public and take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall. For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or e-mail David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.

Perloff, a professor emerita at Stanford University, is among the foremost American critics of 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics. She also is the author of more than a dozen books.

Perloff’s first three books dealt with individual poets: William Butler Yeats, Robert Lowell and Frank O’Hara. She then published her groundbreaking The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), which has gone through a number of editions and which led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994).

More recently, Perloff published the cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004) and the essay collection Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2005), which won the Robert Penn Warren Prize for literary criticism as well as honorable mention for the Robert Motherwell Prize of the Dedalus Foundation.

A former president of the Modern Language Association, Perloff has held Guggenheim, Huntington and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships; served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center; and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

More information on Perloff can be found on her Web site, marjorieperloff.com.