The language of inquiry [[electronic resource] /] / Lyn Hejinian

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910783052003321
• Autore: Hejinian Lyn
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2000
• ISBN: 9786612758744; 1-282-75874-8; 0-520-92227-1; 1-59734-700-0
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (449 p.)
• Disciplina: 814/.54
• Soggetti: Poetics
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 407-420) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- 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
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.