SOURCE: A review of The Futurist Moment, in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Vol. XXX, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 263–65.

In the review below, Ulmer offers a positive critique of The Futurist Moment.

One reason perhaps why the work of Bakhtin is popular with American critics is that it is one of the best statements of the goals of scholarship today—a synthesis of formalist close reading with a socio-historical point of view. Marjorie Perloff's study [The Futurist Moment] does not cite Bakhtin but it does display the virtues of a formalist/historical synthesis. The organizing strategy is to ground the study first in the period just preceding the First World War, the brief utopian moment of Futurism when the artists responded affirmatively to the challenges of the industrialized urban landscape. This grounding allows Perloff to state with some precision the implications for contemporary cultural studies of...