Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture. (Canons) - Softcover

Hyde, Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178689050X ISBN 13: 9781786890504

Publisher: Canongate Canons, 2017

Synopsis

Trickster disrupted the world around him, and in doing so he reshaped it. Playful, mischievous, subversive, amoral, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but they are also indispensable heroes of culture.

Trickster Makes This World revisits the stories of Coyote, Eshu and Hermes and holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston and others. Authoritative in its scholarship, supple and dynamic in its style, Trickster Makes This World encourages you to think and see afresh.

About this title

Review:

"This book is a revelation" (The Times)

"A modern classic . . . which celebrates the power of disruptive imagination" (Guardian)

"A glorious grab-bag stuffed with necessary loot, a joyful plum pudding rich in treasures" (Margaret Atwood Los Angeles Times)

"His big ideas are seriously good ones" (Guardian)

"An act of pure pleasure from first to last" (Michael Chabon)

"Hyde is one of our true superstars of non-fiction . . . Both brilliant (intellectually, literarily) and wise (psychologically, spiritually, you-name-itally)" (David Foster Wallace)

"Lewis Hyde's second masterpiece" (Margaret Atwood)

"A masterpiece . . . The thrilling thing about reading non-fiction such as Hyde's is not just that it gives you new thoughts: it also changes the way you think" (Scotland on Sunday)

"Brilliant...By the time he is done he has folded language, culture, and the very habit of being human into his ken" (The New Yorker)

"Hyde is far more than an astute cultural critic; he's an original and important thinker. Pass it on" (Geoff Dyer)

From the Author:

Description of the TRICKSTER book.
Here is the description of my TRICKSTER book, as it appears in the publisher's catalog. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art An enchanting investigation into the significance of trickster figures, old and new. Lewis Hyde's ambitious and captivating TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in the trickster mythology. Most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town, tricksters are the consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls, subverting defense systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating, and stealing, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable culture heroes. In North America, Coyote taught the race how to dress, sing and shoot arrows. In West Africa, Eshu discovered the art of divination so that suffering humans might know the purposes of heaven. In Greece, Hermes the Thief invented the art of sacrifice, the trick of making fire, and even language itself. Hyde revisits these old stories then holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frederick Douglass and others. The old myths say that the trickster made the world as it actually is. Other gods set out to create a world more perfect and ideal, but THIS world with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt, was trickster's creation, and the work is not yet finished. -- Lewis Hyde / Kenyon College

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Canons
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 178689050X
• ISBN 13: 9781786890504
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432