The Language of Inquiry

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent contemporary American poets.

This book is a comprehensive and readable collection of her essays, and its publications should be an important event for American literary culture.

Here she brings together 20 essays written over a span of almost 25 years.

Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, she 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.

The author's interests cover a range of texts and figures.

Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shlovsky 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.