The peer-reviewed journal of Generative Anthropology, founded by Eric Gans at UCLA. Published 1995–2024 (Vols 1–30), featuring essays by Van Oort, Bartlett, Dennis, Ludwigs, McKenna, Goldman, Eshelman, Gans, Girard, and others.
It gives me great pleasure to serve as a guest editor for the post-conference issue of Anthropoetics . I would like to thank Eric Gans for this opportunity even as I acknowledge his substantial...
Izumi Dryden is associate professor at Mie Prefectural College of Nursing in Mie, Japan. She teaches liberal arts courses on reading in English, literature and medicine, and communications. Her...
Abstract This paper explores the musical interests of Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale, two prominent figures of nineteenth-century England, through the lens of Generative Anthropology (GA)....
Abstract This study investigated the origins of human language through several examples of the characteristic communication styles of aphasic patients and critically examined the widely held theory...
Abstract There are various aspects of language generation, and Eric Gans has identified its mechanisms in the process of human evolution. This paper examines the ancient Japanese religious leader...
Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia globo@uniandes.edu.co Abstract My task in this piece is to give a different but still plausible account of the emergence of the human within the framework...
Andrew Bartlett taught “university writing” and literary analysis at Kwantlen Polytechnic University until his retirement in 2022. He has published reviews in Subterrain , Canadian Literature, COV&R...
andrewhollisbartlett@gmail.com Abstract René Girard’s critical remarks on the originary hypothesis of Eric Gans in Evolution and Conversion (trans. 2007) risk closing off rather than opening up...
Abstract This article investigates the “musico-philosophical” perspectives of the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and the twentieth-century British...
Abstract The Iliad dwells on the wrath felt over an act of transgression. The backdrop for the story is the legend about the abduction of Helen by Paris while a guest at the palace of her husband...
6 chemin des louis blancs 91310 Linas France bppwhalon@aol.com Abstract “The world mediated by meaning” refers to the fact that we all live in the im mediate world created by our senses, and the much...
Peter G. Goldman is Professor Emeritus at Westminster University in Utah and former president of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference. His main areas of research and teaching are...
pgoldman@westminsteru.edu Abstract In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the protagonist is typically called to a new role in the world of the play, as when Hamlet is called to be a revenger by the appearance...
Abstract Generative anthropology posits a private scene tied to language and signification. Since both Eric Gans and Ian Dennis have begun a conversation with Buddhism and the problematic nature of...
Abstract Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been praised for its critique of European colonialism in Africa and blamed for its racial stereotypes in depicting the victims of this enterprise. Its...
Abstract Many contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writers resent their colonial education’s emphasis on British literature, especially Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” poem, which—as V.S. Naipaul, Marlene...
Kinjo Gakuin University Nagoya, Japan Abstract John Lennon’s “Imagine” is an extraordinarily successful song that has become a secular anthem. Not surprisingly, its message often aggravates religious...
Ben Barber is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature Studies at United International College: Hong Kong Baptist University – Beijing Normal University. He teaches courses on...
Abstract Eric Gans’s conception of the origin of metaphysics leads him to conclusions about metaphysics similar to those held by Lev Shestov, an early twentieth-century philosopher who exerted a...
Abstract This article examines Generative Anthropology with respect to its hypothesis that deferral is at the foundation of the human and draws out elements of GA as a lived philosophy or “spiritual...
Editor’s Note: This book will be available for sale by November 11 at : Generative Anthropology in Contexts and Texts (uksw.edu.pl) Downloadable PDF version of review * * * Magdalena...
Abstract The uncompromising human exceptionalism of generative anthropology risks leaving the impression of a disrespect in GA of animal minds. Michael Bavidge and Ian Ground’s investment in the...
Richard van Oort has followed up his remarkable Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment (University of Toronto, 2016) with a somewhat more sharply focused monograph. Where...
Abstract In William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream the addition of the various framing devices to Pyramus and Thisbe begins with Bottom’s desire to monopolize the stage. The craftsmen’s...
Abstract We hypothesize swapping the anthropological vocabulary derivative of central banking (with concepts like “self-interested individuals” and “market forces”) with a new minimal vocabulary...
mschneid@highpoint.edu Tom Bertonneau, my dear friend and prolific Anthropoetics contributor, died peacefully on September 21, 2021. I met Tom 35 years ago, during my first year of doctoral study at...
United International College Zhuhai, China bbarb056@uottawa.ca Abstract The twentieth-century Romanian philosophical stylist Emil Cioran was fascinated by the apophatic mystics of the Reformation....
[Editor’s Note: This dialogue is a continuation of one that began at this year’s (Zoom) GASC Conference] Ian Dennis: Hi again, Chris! Our dialogue at the 2021 GASC Conference is now available on...
Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518 Adam.Katz@quinnipiac.edu It’s long past time for originary thinking to think technics , which is emerging, in the wake of the work of...
Kinjo Gakuin University Nagoya, Japan taylor@kinjo-u.ac.jp Abstract Jane Austen offers an outrageous satire of “sensibility” in her teenage burlesque Love and Freindship , then a more realistic...
joakim.wrethed@english.su.se Abstract Brett Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho may be seen as a literary attempt at creating the ultimate account of the nineteen-eighties yuppie era. As a broader...
Martin Fashbaugh is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the School of Arts and Humanities at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, where he teaches courses in British...
The Dead &rft.source=Anthropoetics&rft.date=2022-04-24&rft.identifier=http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2702/2702fashbaugh/&rft.language=English&rft.au=Martin Fashbaugh"> Abstract This article supports...
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? &rft.source=Anthropoetics&rft.date=2022-04-23&rft.identifier=http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/?p=6489&rft.language=English&rft.au=Peter Goldman"> Abstract In Philip...
Abstract In this paper I explore the idea that Freud’s death drive, despite having its explanatory status and truth claims questioned, is an anthropologically astute concept that embraces the paradox...
Marina Ludwigs is a Docent at the English Department of Stockholm University. She has published on Victorian, modernist, and contemporary literature, as well as film. Besides Generative Anthropology,...
marina.ludwigs@english.su.se Abstract This paper compares rhetorical narratology to Generative Anthropology in order to point out important similarities between their underlying assumptions. It also...
Emeritus Professor of French Loyola University Chicago amckenn@luc.edu Truth is the daughter of time. (Francis Bacon) Abstract This essay examines the explicit truth claims of certain canonical text...
Kinjo Gakuin University Nagoya, Japan taylor@kinjo-u.ac.jp Abstract Though René Girard’s mimetic theory focuses on rivalry, conflict and scapegoating, there has long been an interest in “positive...
This Fall’s issue is the first collection of essays based on papers presented at GASC 2019, “Returning to the Linguistic Turn,” to be published in Anthropoetics . Ben Barber’s “Immanence,...
United International College Zhuhai, China bbarb056@uottawa.ca René Girard’s mimetic theory and Generative Anthropology (subsequently GA) have produced conceptions of cultural and language origin...
Loyola University Chicago [1] amckenn@luc.edu Richard van Oort’s Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment affords a productive encounter between René Girard’s mimetic theory and...
Department of English University of Victoria PO Box 1700 STN CSC Victoria BC V8W 2Y2 Canada rvanoort@uvic.ca Resentment, whose patron saint must be Iago, has many allies. Envy, jealousy, contempt,...
Kinjo Gakuin University taylor@kinjo-u.ac.jp Beauty is sometimes thought to be “objective,” where everyone agrees on who or what is beautiful. Beauty is other times characterized as “subjective,” in...
177 pages Ebook $9.95 Print: $15.95 The way people speak about their relation and attitude toward the liberal democratic social orders most of us live under tends to be, upon reflection, odd. It...
Thomas F. Bertonneau is a widely published author of scholarly and popular articles, now numbering in the hundreds, on a broad range of topics. He has written about twentieth-century American poetry,...
Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University Warsaw, Poland For many years, GA has been inspiring scholars to do research in their specialties from its perspective. It has become a unifying factor for...