Overview

Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a new interpretation of Derrida's writings on the gift, Adam R. Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry's most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination, in genius, inspiration, and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones. By way of his original reading of Derrida's work in Given Time and 'Economimesis', Rosenthal offers a novel account of 'gift poetics' and a new understanding of what makes poetry 'poetry'.

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9781474488419

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Reviews

""An ingenious reading of Derrida against himself frames a highly original exploration of responses to the notion of poetry as gift, from the Homeric Hymns to Flarf, showing its foundational status for the Western tradition and the possibility of distinguishing a realm of art and imagination from the prose of material existence."" -Jonathan Culler, author of Theory of the Lyric

"""An ingenious reading of Derrida against himself frames a highly original exploration of responses to the notion of poetry as gift, from the Homeric Hymns to Flarf, showing its foundational status for the Western tradition and the possibility of distinguishing a realm of art and imagination from the prose of material existence."" -Jonathan Culler, author of Theory of the Lyric"

Author Information

Adam R. Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of French and International Studies, Texas A&M University.

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