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Lewis Hyde to Speak on Creativity & Property

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This Thursday, Lewis Hyde will speak on the measures of our gifts at Dartmouth College thanks to the Center for Cartoon Studies, the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth and the Will and Ann Eisner Foundation. This essayist, poet and culture critic became well-known thanks to the 1983 release of his book called The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, which has a new subheading of Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. In the book, Hyde describes that in a ‘gift economy’ where people share their gifts, whether it be in aeronautics or comics, wealth is increased because the community bonds strengthen as we build relationships. This is, of course, a counterpoint to today’s society where the market economy reigns and wealth is increased because of ‘hoarding’.

Hyde describes the gift economy at work in the scientific community, giving their ideas and findings away, instead of hoarding them in binders on bookshelves. He continues on the overall effects of the science community sharing their gifts A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must ‘fit,’ and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves.”

A local example would be the give and take in a small town like White River Junction. Just this week, Northern Stage shared its theatrical gift with students from the Center for Cartoon Studies. As a thank you, the students send the theater company gifts of drawings based on the play, characters and sets. Both have benefited from the exchange and perhaps view each other in a loving light (that is the ‘erotic’ part of the book, no need to be titillated). It would be an interesting experiment to see if you could get some free dental care in exchange for painting a work of art for the doctor’s lobby or doing a baker’s taxes for free in exchange for wedding cakes. but that could digress into a pure barter economy and dilute the essence of Hyde’s book.

In Hyde’s recent book, Common As Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, he takes on intellectual property and the right we have to own or not own, in this case, ideas. Weaving together legislation dating back to the United States’ roots in British history to current intellectual property law, Hyde attempts to illustrate the idea of ‘commons’ in the light of new media.

Join us for what will be an engaging and exciting talk this Thursday at Kemeny Hall, Room 008 on the Dartmouth campus. Following the lecture and discussion is a book signing, have those questions ready to fire!

-Jen Vaughn

Schulz Librarian


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