This issue of Anthropoetics is unusual both for its dimensions–five articles full-length or longer–and for the variety of theoretical perspectives it contains.
We welcome new contributors Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll from the University of Western Sydney, whose wide-ranging essay is one of all too few discussions by professional anthropologists of GA’s place in anthropology.
The rest of the issue features work by seasoned veterans. Tom Bertonneau, in his seventh contribution to Anthropoetics, defends the very un-PC Nobelist V. S. Naipaul against his PC critics, just as in VII, 1 he defended Ralph Ellison against victimary sanitization. Doug Collins, in his fourth and most far-reaching Anthropoetics article, trains his GA-inspired epistemology with unique subtlety and vast erudition on the century-long enterprise of “critical theory.”
In provocative contrast to Collins’ focus on the postmodern, Raoul Eshelman, in his third article for this journal, persuasively elaborates in the field of cinema the “post-millennial” concept of performatism that he had previously focused on the novel and on architecture. And Matt Schneider, in his sixth article for Anthropoetics and his second on the Beatles, explores the fascinating connection between narrative, popular culture, and conspiracy theories.
About our Contributors
Tom Bertonneau teaches in English at SUNY Oswego and remains affiliated with the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, in Michigan. An original member of the GA seminar, Tom has published over fifty articles on a variety of topics including poetry and the novel, political science, religion, and science fiction, and literacy. His short stories, set in the Santa Monica Mountains, have appeared in Arcturus. He reviews regularly for The University Bookman, and has articles forthcoming in Modern Age, Praesidium, and a symposium on “Augustine and Literature” to be published in 2004. He is the author of the 1996 study “Declining Standards at Michigan Public Universities.” Tom hails from the beach at Malibu.
Douglas Collins, a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board, teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of Sartre as Biographer, as well as articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century French literature.
Raoul Eshelman (Ph.D. University of Constance 1988, Habilitation Hamburg 1995) is a Slavist specializing in modern and postmodern Czech and Russian literature. He is presently a Privatdozent teaching in the Dept. of Comparative Literature at the University of Munich, and is working on a book on performatism.
Chris Fleming is Lecturer and Honours Coordinator in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His research interests include theatre and performance, the philosophy of science, and anthropology. He is currently finishing a book on the work of René Girard for Polity Press.
John O’Carroll is Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His research interests lie in the area of the philosophy of communication, postcolonial theory, and Western epistemologies of landscapes (especially in Australia and the South Pacific). He has also taught at the University of the South Pacific (Fiji Laucala campus).
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 essays on Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, John Keats, and critical theory. He is associate professor of English and Chair of English and Comparative Literature at Chapman University (Orange, California).