A Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde

A Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde

One of our true superstars of nonfiction (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde offers a playful and inspiring defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche.

We live in a culture that prizes memory--how much we can store, the quality of what's preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear--be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness--but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and rebirth?

A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography, and social criticism by the author of the classics The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. It forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a creative and political force. It also turns inward, using the author's own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil.

Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.

Lewis Hyde is a celebrated poet, translator, essayist, and cultural critic. Hyde has been the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Lannan Literary fellowship. Hyde is a former professor of creative writing and American literature at Kenyon College, and former director of undergraduate writing at Harvard University. In previous works like The Gift (1983), Trickster Makes This World (1998), and Common as Air (2010), Hyde explores the role of art in cultural imagination, defending the non-commerciality of artistic practice and exploring the ways ideas from the past inform the present. Hyde's most recent book, A Primer for Forgetting (2019), investigates when forgetfulness might be more useful than memory. Hyde is a trustee of the MacDowell Colony and a founding director of the Creative Capital Foundation. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Patricia Vigderman.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374237219
ISBN 10	0374237212
Title	A Primer for Forgetting
Author	Lewis Hyde
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year published	2019-06-18
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable