The Aura of Modernism

Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost critics of contemporary, modern, and avant-garde poetry and poetics now writing in English. She has published numerous books, articles, and essays on issues ranging from digital poetics to philosophy, and her work has been translated into many languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Slovenian, German, and French.

Her first three books dealt with individual poets: W.B. Yeats, in Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats (1970), The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (1973), and Frank O’Hara, in Poet Among Painters (1977; new edition 1997). With the publication of The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), she began an extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements and their inheritors. 

In this lecture, Perloff reflects on the fate of Modernism in the twentieth century. She focuses on claims that it was either elitist and authoritarian, and thus politically reactionary, or was caught up in processes of capitalist commodification, and therefore unable to resist the very alienation it diagnosed. Perloff traces some of the significant shifts in recent critical work and questions earlier claims about Modernism's reactionary politics, anti-populism, and rejection of the everyday. She also draws attention to the non-academic interest in Modernism that is rife on the internet, where, in fulfillment of Benjamin's prophecy, the distinction between artist and public has broken down and the “pleasure of the text” takes precedence over concerns with ideology. Perloff suggests that although genres such as poems, paintings, and novels have to some extent been displaced by “differential text”, Modernism's established artifacts continue to “stay news” and to exert their strange auratic power.