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 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.

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 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.

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