Along with our three conference articles, this issue includes two others. Matthew Taylor‘s is his third for Anthropoetics and his second on Jane Austen’s problematic novel Mansfield Park, where the mimetic rivalries he analyzes so subtly have long extended beyond the novel to its readers and critics. The analysis of a very different set of novelistic rivalries is the burden of first-time contributor Benjamin Barber, who puts both GA and mimetic theory to use in situating Hunter Thompson’s Rum Diary on the road to postmodernism and his better known Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
About Our Contributors
Ben Barber holds degrees in English and Pedagogy from the University of Victoria, Canada. He is a member of COV&R and presented a paper entitled, “The Double Bind of Missionary Colonialism and the Resulting Postcolonial Crisis in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night” at the most recent COV&R at Saint Mary’s College in London. Ben is looking ahead to graduate work in literary and critical theory, which will focus on Generative Anthropology and mimetic theory in English Literature.
Ian Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, and was the Chief Organiser of the 2009 GA Conference there. He is the author of four novels, of the Girardian study Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997), and of Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware 2009), a work of literary criticism making substantial use of both Mimetic Theory and Generative Anthropology.
Peter Goldman is an Associate Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board, and a founding board member of The Generative Anthropology Society & Conference. Peter teaches classes on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and film studies. His publications include articles on Shakespeare, Reformation literature, film studies, Generative Anthropology, and Kafka. His long term project is a book on Shakespeare and the project of iconoclasm, and he is also now working on an article on originary scenes in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Robert J. Hudson is Assistant Professor of French at Brigham Young University and his academic interests involve questions of Lyricism, Imitation Theory, Petrarchism and Gallicism in the literature of Renaissance France. In his research on literature and film, he cites GA as an extremely useful heuristic for understanding the generic qualities of poetics and the anthropology of artistic production.
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.
Matthew Schneider is chair and professor of English at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 1991. A founding member of the first Generative Anthropology seminar with Eric Gans at UCLA in 1987, Schneider has continued his involvement with GA for more than twenty years, contributing six articles to Anthropoetics, guest-authoring two Chronicles of Love and Resentment, and publishing an essay in Adam Katz’s The Originary Hypothesis. He has published two books, the latest of which, The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, came out from Palgrave Macmillan in June 2008. His articles on nineteenth-century British literature, literary theory, and Biblical exegesis have appeared in Dalhousie Review, European Romantic Review, Poetics Today, Legal Studies Forum, and Symbiosis.
Matthew Taylor is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He teaches courses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), academic writing, teacher training, and culture. He has written and presented on EFL pedagogy and science-humanities issues. He has co-authored an academic writing textbook for EFL students (Cengage) and more recently a speaking skills textbook (Macmillan). His work in mimetic theory, including two previous studies for Anthropoetics, has pursued mimetic analyses of contemporary Japanese society and mimetic interpretations of Jane Austen’s fiction.