Presidential Fellow and prominent literary scholar Marjorie Perloff passed away March 24, 2024. She was 92.
Perloff joined Chapman University as a Presidential Fellow in 2016 and became a frequent presence and speaker on campus. Those who worked with her remember her “keen intelligence, her sense of humor, and her ability to speak her views with clarity and honesty,” said Chapman President Daniele C. Struppa.
She left her library to the Leatherby Libraries.
Perloff, considered one of the most influential American literary critics and scholars of modern and contemporary poetry, was born in Vienna on Sept. 28, 1931, into a prominent intellectual Jewish family. She and her family fled Vienna on March 15, 1938, two days after Germany annexed Austria.
“There was such a mob and we had to wait so long that Mommy said she would unpack a book and I sat down on our hat-box and read. When we finished, we went to the station restaurant where we had ham rolls that tasted very good,” Perloff read from her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, at a lecture at Chapman in February 2016. “And as I was sitting in this restaurant, I didn’t yet have any idea that later in America I would write a book.”
Perloff’s first job was at MGM writing subtitles for movies. She earned her master’s and Ph.D. at Catholic University, where she taught for four years. She went on to teach at the University of Maryland and Stanford University.
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. She overturned views on T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell and other canonized artists, always returning to her close reading and textual analysis. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she translated into English Ludwig Wittgenstein’s secret notebooks, written in code during World War II.
In addition to her many books, Perloff wrote scores of reviews for small magazines and scholarly publications. 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.
