“닫힘의 거부”

“The Rejection of Closure”: Lyn Hejinian’s Crossing Across Poetry Writing

This paper examines how Lyn Hejinian’s My Life embodies a radical experiment with the subjective uncertainty of autobiography, indicating the perceptive response to her essay, “The Rejection of Closure.” As an “open text” of poetic autobiography, My Life surpasses the limits of conventional representation through fragmentations, gaps, semantic shifts, and elliptical sentences. Throughout My Life, the reader cannot expect any consistency or a coherent lyric subject, as that subject changes incessantly from the past to the present. Revealing a strong longing for the closure of perfect communication, Hejinian’s autobiographical intimacy, indeed, is signified as quixotically untenable. Arguing that My Life challenges the problems of representation and expands beyond the limits of “actual representations,” this paper describes how Hejinian crosses the boundary between poetry and prose. Ultimately, it suggests that Hejinian’s autobiography invites the reader to interrogate the language as a pure medium for reflection.