Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

"The only way to get a poem, Marjorie Perloff reminds us, is to read it, word for word, line by line. As we have come to expect, this book is learned, provocative and illuminating, a joyful celebration of the pleasures of the text, and a passionate argument for difference."--Peter Quartermain, author of "Disjunctive Poetics from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukovsky to Susan Howe" "Reading 'differently' Marjorie Perloff makes distinctions--between poem and poem, word and word, critical commonplace and literacy innovation. She unwraps the most recalcitrant works of literacy modernism with an unerring eye for the salient detail and the polylingual pun. The essays in "Differentials" constitute an impassioned manifesto for the worth of the humanities in a time of institutional balkanization and theoretical vastation. She also writes a spirited defense of difficult poetry against sound byte and knowledge lite."--Michael Davidson, author of "Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World" ""Differentials" offers readings with a difference, discovering textual difficulty as a source of pleasure and restoring to literary analysis an excitement we had almost forgotten it might have."--Peter Nicholls, author of "Modernisms: A Literary Guide" Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and author of many books, including "The Futurist Moment, Wittgenstein's Ladder, Twenty-First Century Modernism, "and "The Vienna Paradox, " a cultural memoir.