This issue combines articles drawn from three papers delivered at the GA Summer Conference on the theme of “Esthetic History and the Knowledge of the Human,” held at Chapman University in June, with two other items. The three conference participants, Peter Goldman, Adam Katz, and Richard van Oort, have now among them published a total of sixteen articles in Anthropoetics. Peter’s paper, on Antonioni’s Blow Up and postmodern esthetics, and Richard’s, on Kenneth Burke’s writings on Shakespeare, deal with esthetic history in the usual sense of the term, while Adam’s challenging paper applies the lessons of originary grammar to what might be called a political esthetic. Herbert Plutschow, another frequent contributor to Anthropoetics, gives us an illustrated description of a fascinating archaeological find: a Chinese bronze vessel depicting human sacrifice. And we welcome a new contributor, Edmond Wright, whose study of Gregory Bateson’s linguistic epistemology draws some interesting rapprochements between Batesonian thought and GA.
About Our Contributors
Peter Goldman is Associate Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where he teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and composition. He attended Eric Gans’s seminar on Generative Anthropology in 1997. His publications include articles on English Renaissance and Reformation literature and mimetic theory. Currently he is working on a book entitled Shakespeare and the Problem of Iconoclasm.
Adam Katz is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, a recently published collection of essays on Generative Anthropology. He teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and is presently at work on a new book on and in originary thinking tentatively titled Beginnings in the Middle: Originary Grammar, Remembering Firstness and Retrieving the Ostensive in Modern Semiosis.
Richard van Oort is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria. His book The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics is forthcoming from the Davies Group Publishers.
Herbert Plutschow, a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board, was born in Zurich, Switzerland and was educated in Switzerland, England, Spain, France, and the U.S.A; he received his PhD in Japanese Literature from Columbia University. He is Professor Emeritus of Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA and Dean of International Humanities, Josai International University, Japan. His major publications are Chaos and Cosmos – Ritual in Early and Medieval Japanese Literature (1990); Japan’s Name Culture (1995); Matsuri – The Festivals of Japan (1996); Portraits of Japanologists (2000, in Japanese). Another book, The Tea Master, appeared in 2001.
Edmond Wright holds degrees in English and philosophy and a doctorate in philosophy. He is a member of the Board of Social Theory of the International Sociological Association, and was sometime a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for the Advanced Study of the Social Sciences, Uppsala. He has edited The Ironic Discourse (Poetics Today, 4, 1983), New Representationalisms: Essays in the Philosophy of Perception (Avebury, 1993), Faith and the Real (Paragraph, 24, 2001), and The Case for Qualia (MIT Press, forthcoming, May 2008), and has co-edited with his wife Elizabeth The Zizek Reader, (Blackwell, 1999) and is author of Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith (Macmillan, 2005). Over sixty articles of his have appeared in the philosophical journals. He has also published two volumes of poetry.