Lewis Hyde's interests center on the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, is an inquiry into the situation of creative artists in a commercial society. Trickster Makes This World (1998) is a portrait of the kind of disruptive imagination needed to keep any culture flexible and alive.
Hyde has also published a book of poems, This Error is the Sign of Love, and edited a number of volumes, including The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, a book of responses to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and selected poems of the Nobel Prize-winning Spaniard, Vicente Aleixandre.
Hyde most recently published Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, a book about "cultural commons," that vast, unowned store of ideas, inventions and art that we have inherited from the past and continue to create in the present.
Visit his website at lewishyde.com.
Education
1972 — Master of Arts from University of Iowa
1967 — Bachelor of Arts from Univ Minnesota Minneapolis*
Courses Recently Taught
ENGL 302
Advanced Creative Nonfiction
ENGL 302
Students in this workshop will write imaginative nonfiction in any of its many forms and will write and revise one or more pieces to produce 75-90 pages over the course of the semester. As with all writing workshops, classroom discussion will require an openness to giving and receiving criticism. Outside reading will include essays and at least one book-length work by acknowledged masters of the form. To better explore questions of craft, written responses to these readings will be due each week. Prerequisite: ENGL 200, 202, 204, or a similar course, submission of writing sample and permission of instructor.
ENGL 412
The Arts of Memory
ENGL 412
Memory is the mother of the muses because, as Vladimir Nabokov once noted, all art must work with materials that Mnemosyne, with mysterious foresight has stored up and made available. That gathering up implies, however, that the memory-work of creation is always double, for the creative spirit necessarily consigns to oblivion vastly more material than it ever retains. In this seminar we will study the double life of memory and forgetting by surveying ancient mythology and philosophy (Hesiod, Homer, Plato, Aristotle) the tension between oral and written literature, the rhetorical tradition of memory palaces (Cicero and others), the Christian Middle Ages (Saint Augustine), and finally some modern theorists (Nietzsche, Foucault) and practitioners (Proust and Nabokov). This counts toward the approaches to literary study or the post-1900 requirements for the major. Permission of instructor required.
Academic & Scholarly Achievements
2010
Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010.
1998
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998.
1988
This Error is the Sign of Love. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1988.
1983
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, 1983.