Perloff: Featured speaker
February 9, 2001
Marjorie Perloff, the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University and author of 10 books on various facets of 20th-century poetry and poetics, will conduct the fourth annual William H. Matheson Seminar - "The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp" - at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday in North Brookings Hall, Room 300.
Perloff: Featured speaker |
The event honors the memory of William H. Matheson, who was on the Washington University faculty from 1970 until his death in 1997. He taught broadly in comparative literature: on lyric poetry, on the novel internationally, on literature and madness, and on numerous cross-cultural topics involving comparisons of European or American and Chinese or Japanese writings.
Matheson also introduced students to the interpretation of the interrelationships between literature, music and the arts.
Perloff's first three books focus on individual authors - William Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara. She then turned her attention to larger questions of mode, genre and historical change. "The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage" (1981) is a revisionary study of what John Ashbery called "The Other Tradition"; it has just been reprinted by Northwestern University Press.
"The Futurist Moment: Avant Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture" (1986) has been translated into Portuguese for a Brazilian edition.
"Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media" (1992) takes up the question of our own late century American avant-garde.
"Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary" (1996) studies the link between "ordinary language" philosophy and its poetic counterpart.
Perloff has also edited books on John Cage and postmodern genres and has served on the editorial boards of "A Literary History of the United States" and "American Poetry: The Twentieth Century," just released by the Library of America.
She serves on the editorial boards of some 20 journals and is co-editor of the Northwestern University press series on the avant-garde. She has held Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, been a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Professor for 1995-96, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Perloff has taught at the University of Maryland and the University of Southern California and for the past 14 years at Stanford.
Previous speakers in this seminar series include Robert K. Wallace, Herbert S. Lindenberger and Wendy Faris.
For more information, call 935-5170, e-mail complit@artsci.wustl.edu, or visit www.artsci.wustl.edu/~complit.
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