The Language of Inquiry

by Lyn Hejinian

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.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Theory, Literature

391 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language is the system that makes the world perceptible to us, but also perpetually divides us from it. Hejinian’s work grows out from that paradox; it’s distinguished by its unusual degree of sympathy for the propositions on either side of the comma. You get the same sense reading these talks and essays that you do from much of Hejinian’s poetry: that she revels in the pleasures of syntactical shapeliness, enumeration, and the self that’s assembled in the act of arranging sentences, while at the same time acknowledging, even celebrating, how little grammar’s able to tame the multitudinous reality it orders and names.

The politics implicit in her work enters in its resistance to fixed order and final closure, that dream only language extends; the personal comes through in her grasp of how anxious and powerless an ‘I’ and ‘we’ would be—how bereft of relations with others or the world—without its organizing power. At the same time, language itself is a thing in the world, with ‘of’ and ‘besides’ as real as factories or trees, so Stein trumps Zola in the Realism department, and ostranenie turns out to be the shortest route to the “certain uncertainty” of locating ourselves in the flux of the everyday.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

chunky & difficult I think, it took me a minute (two hundred or so pages) to really feel alert & working in these essays. But we got there & I'm glad. better ready with yr russian formalism & so on. but gertrude stein will carry it through. a special mention to the essay 'Barbarism' which does wonderfully, a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E manifesto though, I am sure, everybody involved would disagree. culminates in the long poem 'Happily'

[Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of essays about language poetry--non-closure.

[Lucas Bailor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Language of Inquiry has some of the most essential essays on contemporary writing, particularly the three essay stretch of "Who Is Speaking?", "The Rejection of Closure," and "Language and 'Paradise.'" However, in my reading, I noticed something that ends up coming up any time I read a writer's collected essays, where they spend a lot of time on their own interests (naturally) that sometimes don't line up with mine. Gertrude Stein's influence is obvious on Hejinian's work, but as someone who isn't as interested as Stein, the few essays on her just didn't hold my interest. I think it was really the second half of the book where it began to lose steam in general for me, as some of the essays also get too into that circular philosophical writing that can be just too much to read sometimes. There were moments I was reading these essays where I probably wasn't in the right headspace for academic essays which may have colored my reading, but I also think generally I just prefer the first half of the book. And since there are some of my favorite essays on writing in the first half of the book, I still view this book quite positively!

[Marissa Perel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have only read parts of this but plan to read it all - so far profound

[Andrew]

Author influenced Naja Marie Aidt in Best European Fiction 2010

[Yonina · Rating 4 out of 5]

More interesting than good...the beginning is better than the middle or end, too.