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Transnational Approaches to Subjectivity, Language and Representation in the Works of Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino Kathy-Ann Tan, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen This paper will deal with the works of Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scapaino, two writers who have been associated with the “Language” poetry movement in the U.S., but whose works demonstrate a transnational scope of influence. Central to the project of these two poets is an engagement with ideas of the self and its boundaries, as well as a negotiation of the notions of subjectivity, language and representation within wider (transnational) cultural, ideological and political contexts. Much of Hejinian’s work, for example, continues to demonstrate the influence of Russian third wave poetry and poetics—she has even published several translations of contemporary Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s work—while Scalapino’s notion of the “tiny self” is indebted to Buddhist theology, and her latest book, Dahlia's Iris — Secret Autobiography and Fiction, draws on the Tibetan form of secret autobiography. In exploring alternative, non-Western, forms of knowledge and representation, what these poets do, therefore, is consciously subvert many of the premises of the American tradition in poetry. One of these premises in contemporary, postmodern theory, in the wake of poststructuralism, is that there is no stable central identity or essence to individuals; an individual exists only as a nexus of social, cultural, ideological and political forces, and is thus a ‘de-centred’ phenomenon. In other words, with the lack of any stable self, there are only subject-positions within an ever-shifting cultural, ideological, signifying field. In my paper, I will explore how these poets address, negotiate and, at times, challenge this premise, by complicating Western models of subjectivity, questioning the role of language in shaping notions of selfhood, and problematizing the idea of the self as embodied in the text. The primary works I will look closely at are: Scalapino’s New Time (1999), in which linear time is collapsed into a spatial kaleidoscope of images and perceptions from time spent in Japan, Berkeley and Oakland; Scalapino’s Dahlia’s Iris, a temporal-lineal narrative interwoven with Eastern notions of perception, action, and thought; and Hejinian’s Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, a series of sonnets inspired by Pushkin's Eugeny Onegin that explore the “patient alternatives” to traditional, Western notions of subjectivity, language and signification.