Anthropoetics III no. 2 Fall 1997/ Winter 1998 Special Section on Wolfgang Iser

Benchmarks

Wolfgang Iser’s article is the text of a talk given at the Learned Societies Luncheon in Irvine on February 24, 1997. His conversation with Richard van Oort, as well as Lahoucine Ouzgane‘s and Eric Gans‘s articles were prepared specially for Anthropoetics. Peter Goldman‘s article is adapted from the first chapter of his dissertation.

About our Contributors
Wolfgang Iser is professor of English at the University of Constance and the University of California, Irvine. His books on reader-response theory include The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, which has been translated into ten languages. His books on literary anthropology include Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology and The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Iser has taught at universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, Britain, France, Spain, Morocco, Korea, and Taiwan.

Richard van Oort holds degrees from the University of Victoria and the University of Western Ontario. In his M.A. thesis, entitled Mimesis, Language, Culture: Speech Acts and Generative Anthropology, he 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.

Lahoucine Ouzgane is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he completed his PhD dissertation on mimetic desire in several major American novels. He has published on women in Islam and masculinity in North African literature; he has also just guest-edited (with Andrea Lunsford) JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory‘s special issue on postcolonial and composition studies (Volume 18.1, Winter 1998).

Peter Goldman is a graduate student with the Department of English at the University of California Irvine. He is currently working on his dissertation ” ‘The Wheel of Conversion’: Ethics, Hermeneutics, and Puritan Spiritual Autobiography.”

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