Hutton Honors College

Discussion Supper with Lewis Hyde.

The winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, Lewis Hyde has been described as "subtle, thorough, and brilliant." In his much-praised book, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, Lewis Hyde explores human creativity and the playful and disruptive side of human imagination, "the essential striving," as one writer described it. He revisits the trickster stories found in so many cultures, including those of Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, and Coyote in North America, and holds them up against the lives and work of other creative spirits, such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, and Frederick Douglass. His other works include The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, which explores the idea of immaterial gifts, such as "the gift of music," as well as material gifts, and the role of the artist in a commercial society, and This Error is the Sign of Love, a book of poetry. His writings have also appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. Professor Hyde taught creative writing at Harvard University before joining the Kenyon College faculty, where he is the Richard Thomas Professor of Creative Writing.

This discussion supper, co-sponsored by the Honors College and the Wells Scholars Program, can range as widely as participants wish but certainly provides an opportunity to talk about the trickster figure in folklore and in modern art and literature; about creativity; about the role of the artist in a commercial, materialistic society; about poetry; and about myth.