Poetics and the Gift

Diagnoses the Western poetic tradition's determinative association of poetry with giving. 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. Adam R. Rosenthal is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at Texas A&M University.