Poetics and the Gift : Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida

Diagnoses the Western poetic tradition's determinative association of poetry with giving Offers a comparative analysis in multiple geographic regions (Europe and USA) and genres (poetry, literature, and philosophy) Speaks to current issues in Poetry and Poetics as well as Continental Philosophy Bridges Derrida's work on the gift with his work on poetry Gives a new interpretation of Derrida's writings on the gift Develops a new understanding of what makes poetry 'poetry' 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'.