Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida

This study explores the relationship between poetry and the gift, comparing it across geographic regions and genres. It argues that the gift is a key figure in poetic discourse, structuring it from Homer to the present. By interpreting Derrida's work on the gift, the study demonstrates how poetry combines extreme aneconomic privilege with the market exchange. It offers a novel account of gift poetics and a new understanding of what makes poetry unique.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 15 November 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Diagnosing the Western poetic tradition's determinative association of poetry with giving, this book offers a comparative analysis in multiple geographic regions (Europe and USA) and genres (poetry, literature, and philosophy). Speaking to current issues in Poetry and Poetics as well as Continental Philosophy, it bridges Derrida's work on the gift with his work on poetry, giving a new interpretation of Derrida's writings on the gift. Developing a new understanding of what makes poetry poetry, the book argues that 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.

Weight: 492g
Dimension: 156 x 231 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474488419