Lyn Hejinian’s Writing. Poetic Language as Language of Inquiry

Abstract

The article is devoted to the poetics of contemporary American writer Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024), considered one of the most consistent successors of Gertrude Stein's experimentalism in Anglophone literary writing. The study encompasses all stages of Hejinian’s poetic creativity: from early experiences of “language writing” in the 1960–70s, autobiographical texts and collective works of the 1980–90s, to theoretical and poetic quests in the first decades of the 21st century. The writer's main interest is the persistence and impermanence of memory and the subject, as well as the role of writing in their preservation and transformation. Descriptions of the writing process as a driving force of memory and experience come to the fore here. Syntax acts as the materialization of temporality in writing. Texts in a variety of formats explore natural and cultural worlds brought to life by language. Many of Hejinian's texts, both theoretical and artistic, explore the problem of language as a social space, as a philosophical search and as political pragmatics, as well as the problem of the relationship of time to language and language to time. The book The Language of Inquiry has become a kind of manifesto for poetic language, which is the “language of inquiry.” A special place in the book is occupied by essays about Gertrude Stein, which actualize the writing practices of the great American modernist in the contemporary context of language-oriented poetics. In her work of the recent years, Hejinian increasingly turns to social themes, never ceasing to experiment with the boundaries of the poetic. She puts forward a theory of so-called “allegorical activism,” which is understood as “artistic and political practice in the service of activating creative potential in everyday life.”

Keywords

• language writing
• l. hejinian
• g. stein
• poetic language
• subjectivity