Matt Schneider‘s study, our first illustrated article, was written especially for this issue. Richard van Oort‘s was adapted from an earlier paper on speech-act theory. Markus Müller‘s article develops the central idea of his doctoral dissertation. Eric Gans‘s text is another chapter from his forthcoming (Stanford) book, Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures, scheduled to appear in March 1997.

About our Contributors
Matthew Schneider, a founding member of the GA seminar (who has managed to attend some portion of the seminar every year it has been given) holds an MA from Chicago and received his PhD in English from UCLA in 1991. The author of Original Ambivalence: Violence and Autobiography in Thomas De Quincey (Peter Lang, 1995), Schneider has also published articles on Jane Austen, John Keats, and critical theory. He is assistant professor of English at Chapman University (Orange, California).

Richard van Oort, who holds degrees from the University of Victoria and the University of Western Ontario, recently completed an M.A. thesis entitled Mimesis, Language, Culture: Speech Acts and Generative Anthropology, which examined the contribution that originary thinking makes to traditionally conceived areas in the philosophy of language and culture. Currently a graduate student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, he is working on a Ph.D. that explores the methodological implications of the originary model for a theory of fictionality.

Markus Müller holds a B.A. in French and History from the University of Tübingen and an M.A. in French from the University of Kansas. He is currently writing a GA-oriented doctoral dissertation on “The Fantastic” in the French Department at UCLA.

Eric Gans is Professor of French at UCLA. His CV is accessible by clicking on his name below.