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.

The Language of Inquiry

Literature & Fiction

HEJINIAN, Lyn

Poetry

University of California Press

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.

History & Criticism

Lola the Interpreter (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

The final book by the award-winning and celebrated writer Lyn Hejinian Lyn Hejinian's Lola the Interpreter is a prose poem in which an 'I' and a series of quasi-characters (including Lola) interpret one another, their quotidian lives, and the terms, categories, and presuppositions that allow fragments of experience to be extracted from the flux of perception and framed as objects of analysis. This work stands as a culmination of Hejinian's lifelong exploration of thought's infrastructure, threading through her oeuvre from A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking to My Life and A Border Comedy, to this, her last book. What perhaps marks Lola as a work of late style, of new experimentalism even at the twilight of Hejinian's life, is the extent to which the interpretation that at first seems to be generated out of discrete events transcends its ostensible occasion and becomes philosophy more broadly, a philosophy poised between a necessary skepticism toward the given or imposed and a life-affirming commitment to the emergent possibilities within the ever-shifting and uncertain domain of daily existence.

Wesleyan University Press

The final book by the award-winning and celebrated writer Lyn Hejinian\nLyn Hejinian's Lola the Interpreter is a prose poem in which an 'I' and a series of quasi-characters (including Lola) interpret one another, their quotidian lives, and the terms, categories, and presuppositions that allow fragments of experience to be extracted from the flux of perception and framed as objects of analysis. This work stands as a culmination of Hejinian's lifelong exploration of thought's infrastructure, threading through her oeuvre from A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking to My Life and A Border Comedy, to this, her last book. What perhaps marks Lola as a work of late style, of new experimentalism even at the twilight of Hejinian's life, is the extent to which the interpretation that at first seems to be generated out of discrete events transcends its ostensible occasion and becomes philosophy more broadly, a philosophy poised between a necessary skepticism toward the given or imposed and a life-affirming commitment to the emergent possibilities within the ever-shifting and uncertain domain of daily existence.

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language―the things people say and the ways they say them―shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Product Description A verse novel composed of 14-line stanzas inspired by Pushkin's Evgeny OneginOver the course of nearly a decade (1983–1991), author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, staying frequently with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. During this period, she embarked on translating into English several volumes of Dragomoshcheko's poetry, and the two poets began an extensive correspondence, exchanging hundreds of letters until Dragomoshchenko's death in 2012. During her fifth visit, in conversation with Dragomoshchenko and other poets, she decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow. Cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically "long," she determined that hers would be "short." What resulted is an experimental novel whose structure (284 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas. From time to time, various members of Dragomoshchenko's circle of friends offered suggestions for the novel, as readers will note. There's abundant narrative content, but anecdotes and events are presented in non-linear form, since they unfolded over extended periods of time and thus came to Hejinian's attention piecemeal. Oxota (which means variously "huntress," "hunt," and "desire" in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground. Allen Ginsberg, who himself visited the USSR, did not like Oxota. He said that it wasn't realistic; Hejinian thinks that it is. Review "Lyn Hejinian's spectral Leningrad recalls the opening of a world in the Cold War's wake―a world of artists and writers hunting for the intersection of words, lives, and things. Reading Oxota today, we find a rare, urgent instance of language able to span identities and ideologies, Russia and America."―Steven Lee, Associate Professor at the University of California Berkeley"It is a deep pleasure to reopen this book, a book of estrangement, of fragmentation, of scattered light and scattered speech, of bridges of sense cast over waters of foreignness. Oxota records a trusting encounter between two poetries across cultural difference unimaginable today."―Eugene Ostashevsky, editor of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's Endarkenment About the Author LYN HEJINIAN is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. She is John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

Oxota: A Short Russian Novel

Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday

Arts & Photography

My Life

Burning Deck

Fiction. Russian-American Studies. Composed of 270 free sonnets inspired by Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, OXOTA: A SHORT RUSSIAN NOVEL is a stunning edifice in language that proposes and enacts an intimate and restive portrait of life in Russia today. The fruit of many years' interest in, study of, and travel through the country, OXOTA (which means "the hunt" in Russian) transforms with epic confidence Hejinian's social and artistic life abroad into a richly peopled landscape, into a literature brimming with signification.

The Figures

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HEJINIAN, Lyn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HEJINIAN, Lyn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HEJINIAN, Lyn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Language of Inquiry

The Language of Inquiry

Lola the Interpreter (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Lola the Interpreter (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Oxota: A Short Russian Novel

Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday

Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday

My Life

Oxota: A Short Russian Novel