School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
Item"A great blooming, buzzing confusion": language, thought & embodied experience in the writing of Lyn Hejinian( 2013)Lyn Hejinian is considered one of the more significant members of the Language poets, a group of late twentieth century American poets who take language as a formative aspect of human existence. Literary critics have largely studied Hejinian’s poetry and essays in that context, using theories based in linguistics and post-structuralism to assert that Hejinian’s writing celebrates the powers of language to shape the world. Hejinian often advocates what she refers to as an ‘open’ text, in which the author uses various techniques to invite the reader to participate in the construction of meaning. However, studies of Hejinian’s work have tended not to question why she believes this embrace of openness is necessary. What is it about language, and its role in the human experience of the world, that allegedly compels this openness? This study attempts to answer this question by examining how Hejinian characterises the human condition: how we speak, how we think, and how both language and thought influence and are influenced by our embodied experience of the world. Such a question calls for a theoretical framework that incorporates concepts from disciplines such as linguistics, post-structuralism, cognitive science and phenomenology. This question also calls for a close reading of both Hejinian’s essays and her poetry, with particular focus on the essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’, which establishes her open poetics, and the prose poem memoir My Life, which is often considered to be Hejinian’s chief example of an open text. A careful analysis of these texts reveals that Hejinian’s writing does not merely celebrate the powers of language, but does so in spite of the failure of language to enclose in words the vast and uncertain nature of lived experience. Hejinian characterises the human condition as poised between an embodied presence in a vast, uncertain world and partial, provisional enclosures of that world through language. Her poetics is predicated on the belief that language can never reach perfect closure and completion because the lived world is neither closed nor complete. Hejinian is perhaps too emphatic in her complete rejection of closure, which is sometimes necessary, but her writing suggests that language can provide partial closures as well as express a sense of wonder, curiosity, playfulness and freedom about the world. This reading contributes an important qualification to previous readings of Hejinian, which have tended to aggrandise the role of language in shaping the world. The deployment of ideas from cognitive science also puts the human use of language in an evolutionary and biological context, which is hinted at in Hejinian’s writing but has previously been unexplored by her critics. For the first time, this study puts Hejinian’s work in relation to the recent turn in the humanities towards questions of biology and nature; in that sense this project will contribute to further research in the same area.