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Infidelity to an impossible task: postmodernism, feminism and Lyn Hejinian’s 'My Life'

Infidelity to an impossible task: postmodernism, feminism and Lyn Hejinian’s 'My Life'
Infidelity to an impossible task: postmodernism, feminism and Lyn Hejinian’s 'My Life'
This paper locates the work and critical reception of the experimental poet Lyn Hejinian within the emerging debates of 'third-wave' feminist critique. It centrally argues that Hejinian's writing at once illuminates and undermines the apparent tensions between a feminist and an anti-foundationalist critical position. It specifically focuses on Hejinian's use of autobiography, as at once gesturing to the limitations of the theoretically naive self-knowing subject, steeped in the discredited assumptions of modernity, and the continuing cultural validity of and desire for narrative, identification, self-expression and referentiality. The paper argues that Hejinian's writing makes sense of this equivocation, not through its use of feminized tropes assumed to subvert the linear assumptions of the genre and render the reader 'active', but through an attention to the ironical complexities of her own cultural positioning. Hejinian's writing demonstrates how the representation of the postmodern feminist subject involves an attention to authoriality, to the possibilities of textual experimentation and to the cultural sites that legitimize the production of meaning for these things. Hejinian demonstrates not simply that feminism can reconcile a need for agency with a critique of agency, and that such an act needs to consider its collective implications, but that these kinds of claims actually require an engagement with the varied contexts that continue to make feminist's attention to literature meaningful.
language poetry, feminism, postmodernism, autobiography
0141-7789
70-80
Marsh, Nicky
52e4155d-1989-4b19-83ad-ffa5d078dd6a
Marsh, Nicky
52e4155d-1989-4b19-83ad-ffa5d078dd6a

Marsh, Nicky (2003) Infidelity to an impossible task: postmodernism, feminism and Lyn Hejinian’s 'My Life'. Feminist Review, 74 (1), 70-80. (doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400110).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This paper locates the work and critical reception of the experimental poet Lyn Hejinian within the emerging debates of 'third-wave' feminist critique. It centrally argues that Hejinian's writing at once illuminates and undermines the apparent tensions between a feminist and an anti-foundationalist critical position. It specifically focuses on Hejinian's use of autobiography, as at once gesturing to the limitations of the theoretically naive self-knowing subject, steeped in the discredited assumptions of modernity, and the continuing cultural validity of and desire for narrative, identification, self-expression and referentiality. The paper argues that Hejinian's writing makes sense of this equivocation, not through its use of feminized tropes assumed to subvert the linear assumptions of the genre and render the reader 'active', but through an attention to the ironical complexities of her own cultural positioning. Hejinian's writing demonstrates how the representation of the postmodern feminist subject involves an attention to authoriality, to the possibilities of textual experimentation and to the cultural sites that legitimize the production of meaning for these things. Hejinian demonstrates not simply that feminism can reconcile a need for agency with a critique of agency, and that such an act needs to consider its collective implications, but that these kinds of claims actually require an engagement with the varied contexts that continue to make feminist's attention to literature meaningful.

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More information

Published date: January 2003
Additional Information: Volume also published as a book, ISBN 1403916241
Keywords: language poetry, feminism, postmodernism, autobiography

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 28929
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/28929
ISSN: 0141-7789
PURE UUID: a968a5e0-59dc-4b9c-8865-aa20afc6a48e

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Date deposited: 18 May 2006
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 07:27

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