As our readers are aware, René Girard passed away last November shortly before his 92nd birthday. The present issue was conceived as a modest memorial to him. All the articles in this issue pay tribute in one way or another to René Girard, who was my teacher and whom I consider the honorary founder of Generative Anthropology.
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.
Andrew Bartlett has been teaching academic writing as a member of the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia (a suburb of Vancouver) since 1998. His book Mad Scientist, Impossible Human: An Essay in Generative Anthropology (Davies Group Publishers) appeared in 2014 and is available on Amazon.com. He has presented papers at annual meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion and at GASC (the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference). From 2009 to 2014, he was President of the GASC. His current research is trying to negotiate between the originary hypothesis, creation theology, and human-animal studies.
Thomas F. Bertonneau teaches English at SUNY Oswego. He is a regular contributor to Modern Age, Intercollegiate Review, and The University Bookman, as well as to Praesidium and Anthropoetics. His “Karen Blixen and the Apocalypse of Man” will appear in the forthcoming (Spring) number of Modern Age; his article on “Sacrifice and Sainthood: The Short Fiction of Walter M. Miller in Context” is forthcoming in Science Fiction Studies. Bertonneau has contributed a study of Walter Pater to Adam Katz’s anthology of GA criticism, also forthcoming. With Kim Paffenroth of Iona College, Bertonneau has written The Truth is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction, published in June 2006 by Brazos Press and available for purchase at Amazon.com. New among Bertonneau’s affiliations is his election to the editorial board of Pashuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (Research in Foreign Languages), a Persian-language quarterly published from the University of Tehran that annually issues an English-language or French-language special number.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Philosophy, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris and Professor of Political Science, Stanford University. He is a member of the French Academy of Technology, a spinoff of the Academy of Sciences, and of the Conseil Général des Mines, the French High Magistracy that oversees and regulates industry, energy and the environment. He chairs the Ethics Committee of the French High Authority on Nuclear Safety and Security. He is the Director of the Research Program of Imitatio, a foundation devoted to the dissemination and discussion of René Girard’s mimetic theory. His most recent work has dealt with the topic of catastrophe. Among his recent publications in English: On the Origins of Cognitive Science. The Mechanization of the Mind (The MIT Press, 2009); The Mark of the Sacred (Stanford University Press, 2013); Economy and the Future. A Crisis of Faith (Michigan State University Press, 2014); A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis (Michigan State University Press, 2015).
Chris Fleming is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the author of René Girard: Violence and Mimesis and one of the editors of the Bloomsbury series, Violence, Desire and the Sacred. His most recent book is Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid (co-written with Emma A. Jane).
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.
Trevor Merrill is Lecturer in French at the California Institute of Technology. He did his doctoral work at UCLA with Eric Gans and was a Fellow of the Association Recherches Mimétiques in Paris. He is the author of The Book of Imitation and Desire, an essay on mimetic desire in the novels of Milan Kundera.
John O’Carroll is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst NSW, 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).
Richard van Oort is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, and the author of The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics (Davies Group, 2009) and Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment (University of Toronto Press, 2016).