This issue contains four articles derived from presentations at last year’s Generative Anthropology Summer Conference at High Point University, as well as one by a new contributor.
Ian Dennis’ third essay for Anthropoetics deals in his usual elegant and masterful fashion with three key moments in the history of the romantic erotic marketplace. Marina Ludwigs pursues her attempt to differentiate among varieties of transcendence with an analysis of the late Eric Rohmer’s most philosophical film, Ma nuit chez Maud. Edmond Wright is already known to our readers as well as our conference attendees for his witty Batesonian excursions on the paradoxical aspects of human behavior made possible by our creation of signs; here he pursues his reflections on such “triangular” phenomena as jokes and the necessity of faith as a basis for linguistic understanding. And we are very happy to welcome Melanie Long, a sophomore at Westminster College who, under the tutelage of Peter Goldman, has authored an incisive analysis of market relations in The Merchant of Venice. I am also very happy to welcome Roman Katsman to our list of contributors. Roman has long been interested in GA and integrates it provocatively into his analysis of the conflictive nature of rhetoric.
About Our Contributors
Ian Dennis is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, and was the Chief Organiser of the 2009 GA Conference there. He is Secretary-Treasurer of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference (GASC). 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.
Roman Katsman is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He is the author of the books The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon (2002), Poetics of Becoming: Dynamic Processes of Mythopoesis in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic Literature (2005), At the Other End of Gesture: Anthropological Poetics of Gesture in Modern Hebrew Literature (2008). Two other books are in press: ‘A Small Prophecy’: Sincerity and Rhetoric in the Works of S.Y. Agnon, and The Hollow of a Sling: A Principle of Alternative History in Literature. Beginning with his article in Hebrew on GA in Agnon’s works (2001), Katsman has written on the issues of GA in almost every one of his publications in English and Hebrew. Currently, he is working on the problem of laughter and violence in the stories by Isaac Babel, as well as on the concept of minimal origin as applied to the works by Etgar Keret.
Melanie Long is a sophomore at Westminster College of Salt Lake City, where she is studying economics with minors in applied mathematics and French. After being introduced to Generative Anthropology by Peter Goldman, she presented a work combining GA and economic anthropology at the 2011 GA Summer Conference.
Marina Ludwigs teaches English Literature at Stockholm University. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine and has worked with, and presented papers on, both Girardian theory and Generative Anthropology. She is currently writing a book on the anthropological structures of epiphanies.
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.