Lewis Hyde Boeken

“One of our true superstars of nonfiction” (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde offers a playful and inspiring defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche. We live in a culture that prizes memory—how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear—be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness—but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and rebirth? A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography, and social criticism by the author of the classics The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. It forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a creative and political force. It also turns inward, using the author’s own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil. Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.

Trickster disrupted the world around him, and in doing so he reshaped it. Playful, mischievous, subversive, amoral, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but they are also indispensable heroes of culture.Trickster Makes This World revisits the stories of Coyote, Eshu and Hermes and holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston and others. Authoritative in its scholarship, supple and dynamic in its style, Trickster Makes This World encourages you to think and see afresh.

The book presents a compelling argument for the value of cultural commons, emphasizing the collective heritage of art and ideas. Lewis Hyde critiques the modern notion of intellectual property by exploring the views of America's Founding Fathers, including Adams, Madison, and Jefferson. He reveals a historical perspective that values knowledge as a shared resource rather than a commodity owned by individuals, advocating for a more communal approach to creativity and innovation.

Examines the concept of gifts in anthropological terms and uses this approach to analyze the situation of creative artists and their gifts to society.

Das Buch von Lewis Hyde argumentiert, dass Kreativität und Kunst Geschenke sind, die über den ökonomischen Wert hinausgehen. Anhand vielfältiger Beispiele aus verschiedenen Kulturen zeigt er die Auswirkungen der Kommerzialisierung auf Künstler und Kunst sowie die gemeinsamen Einsichten in die Natur des Schöpferischen.