View source for Gift-ACLA 2017

{{Event
|Acronym=Gift-ACLA 2017
|Title=ACLA Annual Meeting
|Type=Conference
|Field=gift, literature, theory, sacrifice
|Start date=2017/07/06
|End date=2017/07/09
|Submission deadline=2017/09/23
|Homepage=https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting/about-annual-meeting/annual-meeting-archives
|City=Utrecht
|Country=Netherlands
}}
The Gift in Literature

This session invites papers that address the problematic of the gift in
literature. The gift has been an attractive economic model to describe the
circulation of literary artifacts: as gift, the work of art enters into a direct
relationship with its audience, compelling reciprocities along vectors that do
not necessarily intersect with the monetary transaction that might have put the
artwork within reach: see, for instance, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: How the Creative
Spirit Transforms the World. More complex interventions have since appeared.
Simon Jarvis has been exceptionally successful in integrating insights from
philosophy, anthropology, economics, and aesthetics in his exploration of the
concept of the gift through a series of essays, including “Soteriology and
Reciprocity” and “Problems in the Phenomenology of the Gift.” Extended studies
that draw upon—amongst others—Jarvis’s work have combined careful historical
research with robust theoretical engagements: Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the
Politics of Exchange by Sarah Haggarty (2010) is an excellent example.

Anthropologists and economists have been skeptical of the social value of the
gift, and of its status as an unequivocal social good. In the wake of the
groundbreaking work done by Marcel Mauss, the idea of a genuinely free gift—one
that expects nothing in return—is largely understood to be merely fictional,
or—as the anthropologist Jonathan Parry argues—is an outcome of modern nostalgia
for non-monetized and disinterested transactional relationships. Putatively
‘free’ gifts can in fact become a source of social coercion and inflicted
obligations: this is probably why the Germanic word ‘gift’ also means ‘poison,’
a fact highlighted by Benveniste and taken up by all the major philosophers of
the gift in the twentieth century, including Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Bourdieu,
Bataille, and Marion. The dangerous gift is not merely a linguistic or a
theoretical paradox. For example, it is an accepted fact among economists that
the more widespread the practice of charitable gifting is in a society, the more
unequal and unjust it is likely to be (thus it can objectively be proved that
the United States is significantly more unjust than many European countries; see
Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism, and Reciprocity 23-25, for
instance). However, it is the idea—however idealistic and downright
impossible—of a genuinely altruistic gift that constitutes the horizon of all
contingent performances of the gift.

The act of giving and the economic, historical, ontological, and affective
consequences of this act are of special interest for this session. Topics can
include (but are not limited to) the following; all literary genres are welcome.

Theories of the gift
Xenia and the gift
Reciprocity and desire
Sacrifice, altruism, loss
Destruction as gift
Failed gifts
The given

Please submit 300-word abstracts via the ACLA website. For queries, contact
Nandini (nandini@iith.ac.in)
Acronym	Gift-ACLA 2017 +
End date	July 9, 2017 +
Event type	Conference +
Has coordinates	52° 4' 52", 5° 7' 40"Latitude: 52.080986111111 Longitude: 5.1276833333333 +
Has location city	Utrecht +
Has location country	The Netherlands +
Homepage	https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting/about-annual-meeting/annual-meeting-archives +
IsA	Event +
Start date	July 6, 2017 +
Submission deadline	September 23, 2017 +
Title	ACLA Annual Meeting +