Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida

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'.

Author: Adam R. Rosenthal
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 11/15/2023
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9781474488419

About the Author

Adam R. Rosenthal is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at Texas A&M University. He has previously published journal articles and book chapters on European and American Romantic Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Continental Philosophy, Literary Theory and Deconstruction. He is the Associate Editor of The Online Archive of the Seminars and Courses of Jacques Derrida.