The Phenomenology Of The Reader In Autobiographical Poetry By Stein, Hejinian, And Scalapino

Abstract

Conceptions of the subject in existential phenomenology need to be considered when defining the revolutionary reading practices called for by the Language poets of the 1970s and 1980s. Such terms expand the scholarship of Language poetry beyond the Marxist terms popular in the movement's own poetics, and thus in scholarly language, an expansion I argue is called for through the complicating introduction of the autobiographical into the “revolutionary” language. Using the vocabulary of existential phenomenology as developed by Edmund Husserl, I argue that the role of the autobiographical subject in such poetry is expanded to include the reader, in part via language that welcomes the reader into the creative process in spite of its own density and obscurity. To support this thesis, I examine Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Leslie Scalapino's Zither & Autobiography and The Return of Painting, The Pearl and Orion: A Trilogy.