ENGLISH LITERATURE

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ENGLISH LITERATURE CULTURE

• I IS ANOTHER
• AUTOBIOGRAPHY
• ACROSS GENRES
• Camelia Elias

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Lyn Hejinian, Lynn Emanuel
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Hejinian (1941)

• was born in the San Francisco Bay Area
• poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the
  author or co-author of several books of poetry
• The Fatalist, (2003), My Life in the Nineties
  (2003), and A Border Comedy (2001).

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thinking in construction

• "Hejinian's work often demonstrates how poetry is
  a way of thinking, a way of encountering and
  constructing the world, one endless utopian
  moment even as it is full of failures.
• on The Fatalist, the poet Juliana Spahr
• Hejinian reads from The Future

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If Written is Writing (1978)

• The text is anterior to the composition, though
  the composition be interior to the text. Such
  candor is occasionally flirtatious, as candor
  nearly always so.
• When it is trustworthy, love accompanies the
  lover, and the centric writers reveal their
  loyalty, a bodily loyalty. . . . Marvelous are
  the dimensions and therefore marvelling is
  understandable -- and often understanding.
• (rpt. in The Language Book 29)

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from experience to language

• languaged self, a written I, rather than the
  autobiography of an experiencing I

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The Language school of poetry

• started in the 1970s as a response to traditional
  American poetry and forms.
• places complete emphasis on the language of the
  poem in order to create a new way for the reader
  to interact with the work.
• also associated with leftist politics
• was affiliated with several literary magazines
  published in the 70s, including This and
  LANGUAGE.

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poetics aesthetics

• language dictates meaning rather than the other
  way around.
• involve the reader in the text
• place importance on reader participation in the
  construction of meaning.
• by breaking up poetic language, the poet is
  requiring the reader to find a new way to
  approach the text.

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The Language of Inquiry

• Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings
  are nothing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts
  rarely coalesce into images, rarely come to
  terms. They are transitions, transmutations, the
  endless radiating of denotation into relation.
• Hejinian (2000)

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My Life (2000)

• rhetorical principles
• give form, substance, relevance to the text
• argumentation
• logical ? scientific
• illogical ? composed/constructed through writing
• narration
• not diachronic, but synchronic
• recalls but simultaneously resists chronology
• repetition
• ideas, images, phrases
• association
• ideas, images, phrases

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form (cf. Hilary Clark)

• 45 sections
• 45 sentences in each section
• the formal constraint encourages the fullness of
  being
• anything goes within the 45 lines
• the lines are not subject to narrative principles
  of logic and consequence but to poetic principles
  of similarity and contiguity

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sentences

• each has to contain a story
• dont constitute stepping-stones for linear
  unfolding
• they fit, rather than follow logically, the
  context
• paratactic
• zigzag
• artificial
• fragmentary

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headings/epigraphs

• play against the text
• repeated
• unsettle the language
• undo the language
• language is restless (22)
• the language of inquiry, pedagogy of poetry
  (163)

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deixis

• creates semantic echoes
• that morning, this morning (9)
• four years later, when father returned (when
  exactly?)
• pauses and moments
• the reader must forge the types of perception
  (abstract/concrete)

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time

• synchronous
• telling a story is not the only method of
  remembering a life
• the obvious analogy is with music (24)
• discontinuous
• disruptive
• details are cued by other details, no by their
  progression and unfolding over time.

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motifs/themes

• trees
• fog
• flowers
• solitude
• music ? theme/variation
• repetitions, free from all ambition (7)
• serve the purpose of permutating/combining/reorgan
  izing

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re-writing language

• questions and subverts the clichés of paternal
  authority
• Elbows off the table ? the symbolic order
• manipulates the clichés of femininity and social
  adhesion
• pretty is as pretty does
• re-patterns through fragments and wordplay
• only fragments are accurate
• infinity the sexual side of thought

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Lynn Emanuel (1949)

• was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, in 1949.
• author of three books of poetry
• Then, Suddenly (1999)
• The Dig (1992)
• Hotel Fiesta (1984).
• professor of English and Creative Writing at
  Pittsburg University

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poems as cultural texts

• discourses that address several levels of
  reality
• in order for the poems to work communicatively,
  they have to put into operation and activate the
  authors and readers cultural awareness
• in order for the poems to make themselves
  intelligible, relevant, and aesthetic, they have
  to be involved in a deliberate reworking of
  cultural elements.
• Hard-core Divas Hit the Stone Sharon, Gertrude,
  Lynn

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The I within the I

• the poet Lynn Emanuel is the poet Lynn Emanuel,
  who can write herself out of her Lynn Emanuel
  persona (as a poet, and otherwise?) and into
  the persona of Sharon Stone (and Gertrude Stein)
• observe
• imitate
• embody

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roles

• re-write gender roles
• the passive, domestic, and dependent 50s
  housewife becomes an active, independent writer
• re-write confessional writing
• focus on craft
• stein on stone (as a spy)
• stone on stone (as building blocks)
• Emanuel on Emanuel (poet on prophet)

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portraits as cultural icons

• a poem on portraits
• a portrait of a poem
• a portrait of a (self)portrait
• a poem about itself
• Patriarchal she said what is it I know what it is
  I know I know so that I know what it is I know so
  I know... at first it was the grandfather then it
  was not that in that the father not of that
  grandfather and then she to be to be sure to be
  sure to be I know to be sure to be not as good as
  that. To be sure not to be sure to be sure
  correctly saying to be sure to be that. It was
  right. She was right. It was that. Patriarchal
  poetry... Stein, No more Masks)

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autobiography, poetry, culture

• narrative investment
• reader involvement
• multiple plottings
• separate voices
• divergent memories
• diverse audiences
• ? world of identities and stories