Lewis Hyde
The mid-twentieth century in the United States saw a generation of writers and thinkers working across the boundaries between literary practice and cultural analysis. Lewis Hyde, born in Boston in 1945, came out of that broader intellectual environment as a figure whose work took on several distinct forms at once.
Hyde was educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa, and he went on to work as a cultural critic, writer, poet, essayist, translator, and docent — a range of roles that together mark him as an American scholar in the fullest sense. Writing in English, he moved between creative and critical modes, and his output reflects the variety of those commitments rather than any single disciplinary home.
That variety found recognition in two of the more competitive fellowship programs available to American writers and scholars. Hyde received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellows Program award, honors that together speak to the breadth of what he contributed as both a creative and a critical voice. The MacArthur award in particular stands as one of the more notable distinctions in his record, and it remains a concrete marker of the esteem in which his work has been held.
Quotes by Lewis Hyde
Once the web has lost its charm, its terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem contingent and open to revision. For those epi-predators who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with “no way” trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them.
The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either.
Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that the gift will not come back, that things won’t work out, that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear. In bad faith the circle is broken.
Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. The tree of memory set its roots in blood. To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. To study the self is to forget the self. In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time. The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past. “Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.” We dream in order to forget.
The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The.
We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation.
In one sense the reemergence of ancient usury bespeaks a decline in faith. Gift exchange is connected to faith because both are disinterested. Faith does not look out. No one by himself controls the cycle of gifts he participates in; each, instead, surrenders to the spirit of the gift in order for it to move. Therefore, the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control. If.
Science may not be as intimate as the medical profession; nonetheless, it certainly is a community in which ideas are often shared as contributions, not as proprietary things.