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 ...