delirium clemens

A review of Marjorie Perloff’s survey of Austrian literature, 1918-38(-1970)

Marjorie Perloff was born as Gabriele Mintz to a Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Hitler’s Anschluss and the ensuing Nazi terror against Jews from 1938, the family left their home town for Switzerland and ultimately the US, as many thousands had to at the time. Perloff did very well in the States and, after her university years, soon became a renowned scholar of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford and USC, who did a lot to promote international poetry in particular. Her works such as The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), Differentials (2004), or Unoriginal Genius (2010) are well known to the discipline, as she is personally, for instance as the President of the Modern Language Association in 2006 and as the recipient of various prizes. With her recent book, The Edge of Irony, however, she goes back to her roots and tries to define what the historical and aesthetic basis of writing was in Austria during those ‘earthquake years’ (p. 153) between 1918 and 1938, and in the aftermath of the Second World War: Continue reading →