“Marjorie was one of the most influential American literary critics and scholars of modern and contemporary poetry. She was born in Vienna on September 28, 1931, into a prominent intellectual Jewish family. She and her family fled Vienna on March 15, 1938, two days after the Anschluss. This escape, and their journey to America, is recounted in The Vienna Paradox (New Directions Press, 2003). Perloff’s vast knowledge of European literature beginning with work in her native German, but also including French, Italian, and Russian material, combined with her love of American culture and the American avant-garde, made her a seminal critic and a beacon for students studying literature and language in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Marjorie started her career relatively late in her life. Her first job was at MGM writing subtitles for movies. Later living in Washington, DC, she earned an M.A. in English literature at Catholic University. Marjorie relished her time at Catholic University, finding it to be rigorous and intellectually stimulating and she returned to C.U. in 1965 to get her PhD on “Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats” (published as a book in 1970). Perloff was offered a full-time job by C.U., where she taught four years (1966-1971). She went on to teach at the University of Maryland from 1971 to 1976 .
Marjorie’s writing career took off with the first book on the poetry of Frank O’Hara, one of the great figures of the 50’s and 60’s. “Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters” (1977) secured her status as a major voice in the contemporary poetry scene and introduced her as an influential critic of the visual arts, concrete poetry, book art, conceptual art, and the intersection of language and visual culture. Her O’Hara book was followed by The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), which reevaluated post-war European and American poetry.
Marjorie’s academic career culminated in her appointment as the Sadie Patek Dernham Professor of English Literature at Stanford University in 1990. At Stanford she taught classes on everything from Pinter and Beckett to the work of Language poets such as Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein to classes on Joyce and Proust, as well as mentoring students who have become significant critics and scholars.
In addition to her many books, most published by the University of Chicago Press, Marjorie wrote scores of reviews for small magazines and scholarly publications. These reviews have been collected as Circling the Canon (two volumes, 2019 and 2021). In 1977, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. In 2002, she was inducted into the American Philosophical Society, and in 2006 she served as president of the Modern Language Association. In 2021, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art and made an Austrian citizen.
Marjorie was a maverick, refusing to go along with the latest academic trends or to see herself as victimized by her status as a woman, a Jew, a mother, or a scholar without an Ivy League degree. Instead, her “outsider” status gave her a unique lens on literary movements. She overturned views on T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other canonized artists, always returning to her close reading and textual analysis. Marjorie was fascinated by Futurism and wrote the landmark study The Futurist Moment (1986), dedicated to the magical “defamiliarization” that occurred in Russia between the wars and lifted the modernist project into an experimental sphere that left naturalism and the lyric behind. Her exploration of poetry and technology continued with Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992).
Towards the end of her career, Marjorie returned to the literature of her childhood, exploring the writers of the Austrian diaspora in The Edge of Irony, a book that brought together Paul Celan, Joseph Roth, and Karl Kraus revealing how their own “outsider” status within the Hapsburg Empire gave these writers a mordant wit and despairing irony.
Throughout this later period Marjorie became more and more fascinated by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular his groundbreaking idea that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Tracing Wittgenstein’s influence on artists as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Susan Howe, and Marcel Duchamp, Marjorie opened readers’ eyes to the vast energy of the modernist project. During the Covid pandemic, Marjorie translated into English Wittgenstein’s secret notebooks, written in code during WW I. This brought her into close contact with Damion Searls, whose 2024 translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus includes an introduction by Perloff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/books/review-ludwig-wittgenstein-private-notebooks-1914-1916.html
Marjorie joined Chapman University as Presidential Fellow on September 1, 2016, and became a frequent presence and speaker on campus. Those of us who have had the honor (and great joy) to spend time with her will forever remember her keen intelligence, her sense of humor, and her ability to speak her views with clarity and honesty. Marjorie is leaving to our Leatherby Libraries her extensive library, but more than that she is leaving us the memory of a life lived at its full, with an unrelenting commitment to the search for truth.”
She was a firecracker.