The Language of Inquiry

Lyn Hejinian

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780520217003
• eBook ISBN: 9780520922273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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 Sheherazade; 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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking
• Preface to Writing Is an Aid to Memory
• If Written Is Writing
• Who Is Speaking?
• The Rejection of Closure
• Language and “Paradise”
• Two Stein Talks
• Line
• Strangeness
• Materials (for Dubravka Djuric)
• Comments for Manuel Brito
• The Person and Description
• The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem
• La Faustienne
• Three Lives
• Forms in Alterity: On Translation
• Barbarism
• Reason
• A Common Sense
• Happily
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgment of Permissions
• Index