By Adam R. Rosenthal
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Date: 02/01/2022
Description:
Using a broad, comparative approach, Poetics and the Gift 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, 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.