SOURCE: A review of The Futurist Moment, in Modern Language Review, Vol. 84, No. 4, October, 1989, p. 904–08.

In the following excerpt, Connor commends Perloff's reevaluation of the Futurist movement in The Futurist Moment.

One of the most interesting consequences of the recent debates about postmodernism. has been a renewed sense of the difficulty of defining the modernism which is apparently both recalled and surpassed in the term. In some writers, this difficulty is resolved by simply collapsing the distinction, so that the postmodern becomes a late revival of modernism's iconoclastic impetus, a modernism raised to a higher power. For others, the consequence is a more difficult, contradictory narrative of continuity and rupture.

Marjorie Perloff's study [The Futurist Moment] aims to show that the ferment of cultural and critical innovation in Europe in the years immediately preceding the First World War has been too hastily assimilated to official histories of the...