ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE

1. ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE ‘I’ IS ANOTHER: AUTOBIOGRAPHY ACROSS GENRES Camelia Elias

2. Lyn Hejinian, Lynn Emanuel

3. 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).

4. 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

5. 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)

6. from experience to language • ‘languaged self’, a written “I”, rather than the autobiography of an experiencing “I”

7. 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 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.

8. 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.

9. 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)

10. 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

11. 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

12. sentences • each has to contain a story • don’t constitute stepping-stones for linear unfolding • they fit, rather than follow logically, the context • paratactic • zigzag • artificial • fragmentary

13. 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)

14. 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)

15. 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.

16. motifs/themes • trees • fog • flowers • solitude • music  theme/variation • “repetitions, free from all ambition” (7) • serve the purpose of permutating/combining/reorganizing

17. 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”

18. 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

19. 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 author’s and reader’s 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

20. 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

21. 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)

22. 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)

23. autobiography, poetry, culture • narrative investment • reader involvement • multiple plottings • separate voices • divergent memories • diverse audiences •  world of identities and stories