Download Transnational Approaches to Subjectivity and Agency in the Works

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.