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? Marjorie Perloff’s latest book, Unoriginal Genius, discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism, the Oulipo, hybrid citational texts by Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, the new syncretism of Caroline Bergvall and Yoko Tawada, and the conceptualism of Kenneth Goldsmith. “For over a decade Marjorie Perloff has been carefully approaching the concrete poetry movement from different angles and in Unoriginal Genius she finally tackles its central role in the post-war literary scene. A keen strategist, Perloff’s reading of concretism as playing a part in the arriere-garde is an instant classic.” Antonio Sergio Bessa, author of Oyvind Fahltrom: The Art of Writing
