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Marjorie Perloff

Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century Hardcover – December 1, 2010

by Professor Marjorie Perloff (Author)

7 ratings

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What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information— a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, "originality" begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other people’s words—framing, citing, recycling, and otherwise mediating available words and sentences, and sometimes entire texts. Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of "unoriginal" writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, "personal" than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and 90s.

Perloff traces this poetics of "unoriginal genius" from its paradigmatic work, Benjamin’s encyclopedic Arcades Project, a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo, both movements now understood as precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein’s opera libretto Shadowtime and Susan Howe’s documentary lyric sequence The Midnight. Perloff also finds that the new syncretism extends to language: for example, to the French-Norwegian Caroline Bergvall writing in English and the Japanese Yoko Tawada, in German. Unoriginal Genius concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptualist book Traffic—a seemingly "pure’" radio transcript of one holiday weekend’s worth of traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff shows us "poetry by other means" of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.

Print length

232 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of Chicago Press
Publication date

December 1, 2010
Dimensions

6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0226660613
ISBN-13

978-0226660615
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books, including Poetics in a New Key and Unoriginal Genius, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; 1st Edition (December 1, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 232 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226660613
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226660615
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.06 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,093,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,906 in Poetry Literary Criticism (Books)
- #9,756 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #10,769 in Literary Movements & Periods

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Jennifer Dick

More smart writings from Perloff

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2014

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There are few critics writing in the USA today like Marjorie Perloff. She dares to address the complex, the confusing, the amazingly edgy and the necessary but often left on the side. Here, this collection of writings on the writings of "the new century", this epoch of "writing in an environment of hyperinformation" has sparked many debates and disagreements and in so doing has proved its necessity and place in the current discourse about reusing giving materials in literature, hypertextuality and conceptual writing. It has enough in it to nourish her readers for years as they tackle the tough works out there that Perloff is discussing--those of Walter Benjamin, Susan Howe or Charles Bernstein, for example--Perloff is here providing ways and tools to reflect on these authors or movements such as the legacy of the Brazilian concrete poets, helping scholars, authors, philosophers and historians read and understand or place the writings she is studying in the grand literary and artistic arcs of the past and of the ongoing century. Well crafted, sharp, Perloff's essays invite one to respond in kind, to think back, to read and reread the works she has looked at along with this book. This is a collection well worth spending your time with!

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T. Carmody

a much-needed survey

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 6, 2010

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Perloff provides a comprehensive and comprehensible survey of appropriation, citation and quotation as literary practices. Though some of her inclusions seem more intuitive than required, Unoriginal Genius is a much-needed frame for a very important contemporary literary conversation.

10 people found this helpful

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raymond Obermayr

Unoriginal citation

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 11, 2013

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Marjorie Perloff is a wonderful writer, absolutely clued in to what's happening in poetry.

Is the constraint
of unoriginal citation
too strained
for poetry?

2 people found this helpful

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Jackie Chan

Two Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 1, 2015

good for information gathering, otherwise, snore...

2 people found this helpful

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Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century Hardcover – December 1, 2010

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Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century Hardcover – December 1, 2010

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