Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively
understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations.
Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare
as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even
necessity of radical generosity, of gifts that break the cycle of
economy and self-interest. The prologue reads Marlowe's Dr. Faustus
to show how the play aligns gift and grace, depicting Faustus's
famous bond as the instrument simultaneously of reciprocal exchange
and of damnation. In the introduction, the author frames his
argument theoretically by placing Marcel Mauss's classic essay,
"The Gift," into dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas,
and Paul Ricoeur to sketch two very different understandings of
gift-giving. In the first, described by Mauss, the gift becomes a
covert form of exchange. Though Mauss contrasts the gift economy
with the market economy, his description of the gift economy
nevertheless undermines his own project of discovering in it a
basis for social solidarity. In the second understanding of gift
exchange, derived from the philosophy of Levinas, the gift
expresses the radical asymmetry of ethical concern. Literature and
philosophy scholars alike will benefit from the original readings
of The Merchant of Venice, Edward II, King Lear, Titus Andronicus,
and The Tempest, which constitute the body of the text. These
readings find in the plays a generosity that exceeds the social
practice of gift-giving, because extraordinarily generous acts of
friendship or filial affection survive the collapse of social
norms. Antonio in Merchant and the title character in Edward II
practice a friendship whose extravagance marks its excess. Lear, on
the other hand, brings about his tragedy by attempting to reduce
filial love to debt. Titus also discovers a love excessive to
social convention when rape and mutilation annihilate his
daughter's cultural value. Finally, Prospero in The Tempest
sacrifices power and even his own life for the love of his
daughter, giving a gift rendered asymmetrical by both its excess
and its secrecy. While proposing new readings of works of
Renaissance drama, Forgiving the Gift also questions the model of
human life from which many contemporary readings, especially those
characterized as new historicist or cultural materialist, grow. In
so doing, it addresses questions of how we are to understand
literary texts-and how we are to live with others in the world.
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