A selection of essays by the distinguished writer and critic
Marjorie Perloff, poetry critic and professor emerita at Standford University, has written a review of Samuel Beckett's Letters for Bookforum.com. During the course of her career, Perloff has specialized in modernist poetry, fiction and avant-garde literature; she has also often drawn upon the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is the author of Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. But, for the time being at least, it's her writing on Beckett that interests me most.'Marjorie Perloff teaches courses and writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California.'
Steve Mitchelmore has drawn attention to one of Perloff's essays on Beckett, which is now available online at her official website. There is a wealth of critical writing available at the site, originally published in a wide range of collections and academic journals, alongside a selection of interviews and multimedia features. So, to cut to the point: I've done some rudimentary browsing, and managed to snag some of her critical analyses of Beckett's work, all freely available for your perusal:
- “An Image from a Past Life”: Beckett’s Yeatsian Turn Published in Fulcrum, No. 6, 2007
- The Beckett/ Feldman Radio Collaboration: Words and Music as Hörspiel Published in The Beckett Circle 26, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 207-11.
- The Silence that is Not Silence: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett's 'Embers' Published in Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 247-68.
- “In Love with Hiding”: Samuel Beckett’s War Published in Iowa Review, 35, no. 2 (2005): 76-103.
