The Gift and the Commons: Creativity and the Public Good with Lewis Hyde

  Please join us for two free public lectures by visiting writer and scholar, Lewis Hyde.

The Gift, Lewis Hyde’s groundbreaking study of creativity, explores the meaning of art in a market driven society.  Hyde asks questions central to the lives of artists as well as teachers and others who serve the public good: How do we discover work that satisfies beyond financial compensation?  What is the artist’s role in a consumer culture?  What are our norms for reciprocity and how do gifts create bonds in communities?  Hyde’s current project extends these questions to the realm of the “cultural commons” – “that vast store of unowned ideas, inventions, and works of art we have inherited from the past, and that we continue to create.” As we debate “intellectual property,” cultural “piracy,” and what counts as shared “cultural literacy,” these issues take on renewed urgency. 

Event Details: 

Date: Wednesday, February 3
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Location: Pacific Northwest College of Art, Swiegert Commons
This lecture is co-sponsored by Lewis and Clark’s Center for Community Engagement and PNCA. 

Date: Thursday, February 4
Time: 4 p.m.
Location: Lewis & Clark, Templeton Campus Center, Council Chambers
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Community Engagement and Lewis and Clark’s College of Arts and Sciences. 

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Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. In addition to The Gift, he is the author of Trickster Makes This World, which uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. A MacArthur Fellow, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Read what the New York Times has to say about Lewis Hyde:

November 16, 2008
What Is Art For? by Daniel B. Smith
“The poet, philosopher, translator and scholar Lewis Hyde has spent his life trying to figure that out - and became a literary cult figure in the process.”