The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir - Softcover

Perloff, Marjorie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811215717 ISBN 13: 9780811215718

Publisher: New Directions, 2004

Synopsis

A fascinating memoir of refugee flight and survival, intellectual yet highly personal, by one America's eminent literary critics.

The Vienna Paradox is Marjorie Perloff's memoir of growing up in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to America in 1938 with her upper-middle-class, highly cultured, and largely assimilated Jewish family, and her self-transformation from the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz to the English-speaking Marjorie―who also happened to be the granddaughter of Richard Schüller, the Austrian foreign minister under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations. Compelling as the story is, this is hardly a conventional memoir. Rather, it interweaves biographical anecdote and family history with speculations on the historical development of early 20th-century Vienna as it was experienced by her parents' generation, and how the loss of their "high" culture affected the lives of these cultivated refugees in a democratic United States that was, and remains, deeply suspicious of perceived "elitism." This is, in other words, an intellectual memoir, both elegant and heartfelt, by one of America's leading critics, a narrative in which literary and philosophical reference is as central as the personal.

About this title

About the Author

Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and the author and editor of over a dozen books on literary and art criticism as well as cultural history.

Reviews

Since emigrating from Vienna with her family in 1938 at the age of six-and-a-half, the former Gabriele Mintz has made a reputation for herself under the penname Marjorie Perloff. Her books (The Dance of the Intellect; The Futurist Moment, etc.) have established her as one of the major American critics of 20th century modernist and late-modernist writing. In this memoir, she traces her intellectual and social development, showing how they were shaped by her experience as a refugee from a hostile territory that she would not see again until 1955, after she was married but still before she launched her career. Though Perloff works in resonances from Vienna’s modernist artists throughout her book, most of it remains a straightforward telling of who her family was and is, and of how she navigated her way from the New York City schools to Oberlin College. Not a conventional coming-of-age memoir that processes things emotionally, Perloff’s story of her youth hones in on the institutions, people and places that formed her logos, by chance and by choice. In that, it is entirely successful.
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Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811215717
• ISBN 13: 9780811215718
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224