The language of inquiry / Lyn Hejinian.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hejinian, Lyn.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hejinian, Lyn--Aesthetics.

Hejinian, Lyn.

Poetics.

Aesthetics.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

ix, 438 pages ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2000]

Summary:

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.

Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Scheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian Formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

These essays are exceptionally pleasurable to read: while they address difficult and complex issues, the relaxed and vivid manner of Hejinian's engagement never unnecessarily complicates the difficulties. Indeed, she makes those difficulties marvelously palpable, particular, and concrete.

Contents:

A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking 7

If Written Is Writing 25

Who Is Speaking? 30

The Rejection of Closure 40

Language and "Paradise" 59

Two Stein Talks 83

Line 131

Strangeness 135

Materials (for Dubravka Djuric) 161

Comments for Manuel Brito 177

The Person and Description 199

The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem 209

La Faustienne 232

Three Lives 268

Forms in Alterity: On Translation 296

Barbarism 318

Reason 337

A Common Sense 355

Happily 383.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 407-420) and index.

ISBN:

0520216997

0520217004

OCLC:

43864298