The Language of Inquiry [Paperback]

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poemMy Life,a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia.The Language of Inquiryis 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.

Lyn Hejinianis a poet and the author ofWriting Is an Aid to Memory(1996),The Cold of Poetry(1994),The Cell(1992), andMy Life(1987), among other books. She has taught at several universities and colleges and was the 1993 Roberta Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Hejinian's essays are a keystone of postwar North American poetics. They are also a great pleasure to read, for Hejinian is an extraordinarily resonant stylist whose work combines the lushness of her poetry with an engaging aesthetic and philosophical inventiveness. This is writing that avoids closure in the pursuit of unfolding, multifaceted, restive thought.The Language lóä