The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Avant-garde and Modernism Studies)

Marjorie Perloff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810117649 ISBN 13: 9780810117648

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2000

This study, first published in 1981, argues that the map of modernist poetry needs to be redrawn so as to include a central tradition that cannot properly be located within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition that dominated the early-20th century. Marjorie Perloff traces this tradition from its early ""French connection"" in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern ""landscapes without depth"" as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.

About the Author:

Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie Dernham Patek professor of Humanities at Stanford University. She is the author of many books of literary criticism, including Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric and The Dance of the Intellect, both published by Northwestern University Press.