Jacob Edmond

Lyn Hejinian and Russian Estrangement

This essay shows how the Language poet Lyn Hejinian came to relate her experiences of Russia and her poetics of the ‘‘person’’ to Victor Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement (ostranenie). I argue that in The Guard (1984), Oxota (1991), Leningrad (1991), and in other writings about Russia, Hejinian came to conflate poetic estrangement with the estranging effect of Russia itself and, in so doing, developed her poetics of the person, which linked the material text of poetic estrangement with the social poetics of everyday life. Everyday life in Russia seemed to take on the very qualities that she associated with estrangement: the dissolution of defined objects and essential selfhood and their replacement with the dynamic experience that Hejinian defined as ‘‘personhood.’’ At the same time, Hejinian found in this dynamic personhood a means to oppose essentialist national identities, so that Russian estrangement also became central to her utopian vision of bridging the ColdWar divide betweenRussia and the United States. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004), at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2004), and at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand, 2004). I also presented talks related to this essay at theThirty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (Boston, 2004) and at UCLA (2004). I thank the audiences for their comments and in particular Svetlana Boym, Marjorie Perloff, and Stephanie Sandler. I would also like to thank Vitaly Chernetsky, Murray Edmond, Meir Sternberg, Barrett Watten, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on written drafts of this essay. I am grateful to Lyn Hejinian for granting me permission to quote from her unpublished papers. I also thank the staff at the Mandeville Special Collections Library (University of California, San Diego), the Friends of the UCSD Libraries, Fulbright New Zealand, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Department of English at the University of Otago for their support. Poetics Today 27:1 (Spring 2006). Copyright

Diffracted Waves and World Literature

Our post–Cold War era of globalization and the associated expansion of information and communication technologies have encouraged the view that literary history on a world scale is best described as a series of waves translated from culture to culture. In the turn-of-the-millennium essay that expresses this view most influentially, Franco Moretti repeats the word ‘wave’ no fewer than twenty-three times, describing it as the key metaphor for the ‘distant reading’ of world literature. As Moretti notes, the metaphor of the wave has done powerful conceptual and theoretical work across various branches of the humanities and sciences. Moretti cites linguistics and archaeology, but its most obvious uses have arguably been in physics, where ‘wave’ is hardly perceived as a metaphor at all. Yet the idea of seeing light as in some way analogous to the up and down movements of water on the world’s oceans is at root metaphorical. The tendency to ignore this metaphoricity has caused more than one conceptual slip-up in the history of science, where the metaphor at one time predicted the medium of ether in space and seemed to disallow the possibility of light being both wave and particle.

The Flâneur in Exile

HOW CAN ONE acknowledge points of contact among disparate texts, times, places, languages, and cultures without doing violence to their particularity? This problem becomes especially acute when discussing modern and contemporary literature, since the ever increasing connections produced by globalization have also resulted in a plurality of cultural positions whose complex interconnections unsettle notions of commensurability and equivalence that derive from comparative literature’s Eurocentric legacy. As a result, the discipline of comparative literature is in danger of becoming caught in a continuous movement of selfreferential deconstruction, oscillating between the universal and the particular, between old Eurocentric practices and the possibility of resisting and subverting them. In this essay I propose that the flâneur in exile addresses and offers an alternative to this endless oscillation between sameness and difference. I use the phrase flâneur in exile to refer to the encounter between a paradigmatic figure of European modernity, the flâneur, and contemporary Chinese poetry, especially the exilic writing of Yang Lian 杨炼. In its overlaying or superimposing of places, times, languages, and cultures, this encounter embodies the bewildering complexity of the present moment. It also suggests an approach to comparative literature that would address this complexity by acknowledging the constitutive role that such moments of mutually estranging encounter play in modern literature and culture. Taken as a figure for comparability, the flâneur in exile emphasizes collision, encounter, and touch, rather than mimetic models of comparison that claim equivalence or commensurability. While recognizing the elision of difference that occurs through the superimposition of texts, languages, cultures, times, and places, the figure also produces moments of particularity that emerge

Locating Global Resistance: the Landscape Poetics of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Lyn Hejinian and Yang Lian

Yang Lian 楊煉 from China represent attempts to renegotiate subjectivity in the early to mid 1980s, a time of local and global, social and political change. Their poetry challenges both literary norms and contemporary consciousness, by proposing a consciousness of consciousness, formally and thematically, through the dialectic of “I” and language, person and landscape. This essay uses close readings of “Summa Elegia” (Summa elegii) by Dragomoshchenko, The Guard by Hejinian, and “Norlang”

Dislocated Location and Impersonal Autobiography: Yang Lian and the Object of Contemporary Chinese Poetry

This chapter traces the double movement of decentring and recentring that author detects in Yang Lians work first by examining the relationship between modernist poetics and the discourse of the local and global, through which Chinese writers are often discussed. It argues that the local/global binary is structurally related to the modernist poetics of the object and its insistence on the absolute separation of the poetic object from location, subjectivity and authorship. The chapter then shows how in his essayistic writing, Yang engages with both the local/global binary and the modernist poetics of the object, adopting, adapting and unsettling the underlying structural assumptions of each. Finally, it argues that Yangs post-1989 poetic practice provokes and unsettles both located and dislocated, autobiographical and impersonal readings, suggesting the need for a reconceptualization of the object of study in contemporary Chinese poetry and in the poetics of cross-cultural reading alike. Keywords: autobiography; Chinese poetry; cross-cultural reading; decentering; dislocated location; impersonal readings; recentring; Yang Lian

The Flâneur in Exile

HOW CAN ONE acknowledge points of contact among disparate texts, times, places, languages, and cultures without doing violence to their particularity? This problem becomes especially acute when discussing modern and contemporary literature, since the ever increasing connections produced by globalization have also resulted in a plurality of cultural positions whose complex interconnections unsettle notions of commensurability and equivalence that derive from comparative literature’s Eurocentric legacy. As a result, the discipline of comparative literature is in danger of becoming caught in a continuous movement of selfreferential deconstruction, oscillating between the universal and the particular, between old Eurocentric practices and the possibility of resisting and subverting them. In this essay I propose that the flâneur in exile addresses and offers an alternative to this endless oscillation between sameness and difference. I use the phrase flâneur in exile to refer to the encounter between a paradigmatic figure of European modernity, the flâneur, and contemporary Chinese poetry, especially the exilic writing of Yang Lian 杨炼. In its overlaying or superimposing of places, times, languages, and cultures, this encounter embodies the bewildering complexity of the present moment. It also suggests an approach to comparative literature that would address this complexity by acknowledging the constitutive role that such moments of mutually estranging encounter play in modern literature and culture. Taken as a figure for comparability, the flâneur in exile emphasizes collision, encounter, and touch, rather than mimetic models of comparison that claim equivalence or commensurability. While recognizing the elision of difference that occurs through the superimposition of texts, languages, cultures, times, and places, the figure also produces moments of particularity that emerge