This issue of Anthropoetics contains articles by three attendees of the joint COV&R-GASC (and Japan Girard Association) conference last July in Tokyo. Both Peter Goldman‘s and Ben Barber‘s articles are taken from papers delivered at the conference. Peter, in his eighth Anthropoetics article, continues his Shakespearean reflections with the valedictory Tempest, treated as a historical farewell to the possibility of Shakespearean theater. Ben, after an earlier piece on Hunter Thompson, turns to classical English literature with an essay on the Shakespeare near-contemporary Heywood as chronicling the breakdown of the rigid social system of the Middle Ages, exemplified by a hitherto inconceivable rivalry between a commoner and the king. And Marina Ludwigs, in her sixth contribution, takes up the interesting phenomenon, largely confined to its own community, of Russian exile literature in the West, which she shows as creating a unique topography in Western cities such as New York or London, turning walking into a figure of narrative self-creation and self-reflection.
Finally, I am happy to present an article on La chanson de Roland, always one of my favorite works of literature, by Robert Rois, a UCLA PhD whom I have known for many years and who has recently begun taking an interest in GA. The ostensive/imperative contrast he describes in Roland’s delayed blowing of his horn, the crux of the epic, shows the applicability of GA’s linguistic concepts to the analysis of this seminal medieval work.
About Our Contributors
Ben Barber is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, where he holds a Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Scholarship for his research on the influence of Shakespeare’s representations of mimetic desire upon the poetic vision of Lord Byron. In 2012 he received an MA in English from the University of Victoria, where his research focused on honor and mimetic rivalry in early modern drama.
Peter Goldman is Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He serves on the editorial board for Anthropoetics and is also a board member of the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC). 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 current project is a book on Shakespeare and the problem of iconoclasm, for which the article here will be a chapter.
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.
Robert Rois occasionally teaches beginning Spanish language courses at Valley College in Los Angeles. Born in Havana, he left Cuba with his parents, first wave political refugees of the 60’s. His alma mater is U.C. Berkeley. After a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris studying Medieval French, he finished a Ph.D. in Romance Linguistics and Literature at UCLA. He resides in California.