Abstract
This paper locates the work and critical reception of the experimental poet Lyn Hejinian within the emerging debates of ‘third-wave’ feminist critique. It centrally argues that Hejinian's writing at once illuminates and undermines the apparent tensions between a feminist and an anti-foundationalist critical position. It specifically focuses on Hejinian's use of autobiography, as at once gesturing to the limitations of the theoretically naive self-knowing subject, steeped in the discredited assumptions of modernity, and the continuing cultural validity of and desire for narrative, identification, self-expression and referentiality. The paper argues that Hejinian's writing makes sense of this equivocation, not through its use of feminized tropes assumed to subvert the linear assumptions of the genre and render the reader ‘active’, but through an attention to the ironical complexities of her own cultural positioning. Hejinian's writing demonstrates how the representation of the postmodern feminist subject involves an attention to authoriality, to the possibilities of textual experimentation and to the cultural sites that legitimize the production of meaning for these things. Hejinian demonstrates not simply that feminism can reconcile a need for agency with a critique of agency, and that such an act needs to consider its collective implications, but that these kinds of claims actually require an engagement with the varied contexts that continue to make feminist's attention to literature meaningful.
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Notes
Lyn Hejinian ‘Letter to Susan Howe’, 1987, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, at University of California, San Diego [MSS 201, Box 1, Folder 8].
Language writing has received an increased amount of attention in the past five years. Perelman (1996) has provided one of the most revealing histories of the movement.
Both ‘Redo’ and ‘The Guard’ were republished in The Cold of Poetry, Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994: 14.
Interestingly Spahr's recent monograph, Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, gives a fuller and more complex account of the assumptions of experimental writing than this essay.
The differend is Lyotard's description for the point at which the continual friction between phrase regimes becomes visible, the significance of art lies in its ability ‘bear witness’ to this process.
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Marsh, N. ‘Infidelity to an Impossible Task’: postmodernism, feminism and Lyn Hejinian's ‘My Life’. Fem Rev 74, 70–80 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400110
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400110