Benchmarks

With the exception of Andrew Bartlett ‘s brilliant essay on the originary theology of the Son, a companion piece to his “Three Affirmations of the Being of God” in Anthropoetics 13, 2, this issue focuses on in-depth literary analysis. Ian Dennis provides a rich application of originary thinking to historical analysis in his study of the victimary evolution of Crabbe’s 18th-century poem “Peter Grimes” into Britten’s 20th-century opera. Andrew’s and Ian’s articles were both drawn from papers delivered at last June’s GA Summer Conference at Chapman University on the theme of “Esthetic History and the Knowledge of the Human.” Bob Hudson , a newcomer to Anthropoetics , advances an ambitious originary theory of lyric in his discussion of the earliest French sonnets. Scott Sprenger , Bob’s senior colleague at BYU, who has previously published two Anthropoetics articles on Balzac, gives us a provocative analysis of Prosper Mérimée’s late story, “Lokis.” And Matthew Taylor , known to Anthropoetics readers for his astute observation of Japanese society, returns to his professional specialty with a stimulating Girardian analysis of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park . About Our Contributors Andrew Bartlett lives in Vancouver and teaches composition and literary analysis at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia. He has attended several meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. He organized the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event in Vancouver (July 2007). He is working on a book-length study in applied GA, Playing God the Creator: Science Fictions of the Artificial Human . Ian Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of four novels, and of a Girardian study, Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997). His Lord Byron and the History of Desire is forthcoming with the University of Delaware Press, and he will host the third GA meeting in Ottawa in 2009. Robert J. Hudson is Assistant Professor of French at Brigham Young University, where he specializes in the French Renaissance, lyrical poetry, French film, and socio-anthropological approaches to literature. A 2008 PhD (UCLA), he has recently begun work on a book-length manuscript with the working title “Lyrical Lyon: Plato, Petrarch and Poetry in the Cradle of Renaissance France,” which will seek to both explore and explain the birth of the French lyric. Bob also looks forward to participating in the 2009 GASC in Ottawa. Scott Sprenger is Associate Professor of French and director of European Studies at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He has published around 35 articles and chapters on 19th-century and 20th-century literature, and his book Balzac, archéologue de la conscience is slated to appear at Encrage Editions (France) in 2009. He is currently working on another book on the relation between secularization and 19th-century representations of catastrophic marriage titled Marriage in 19th-century France : A perverse history of secularization . He is editor of the journal Lingua Romana , a former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at UCLA (1999-2001), and currently a Fulbright-Schuman scholar at the CNRS in Paris. 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, science-humanities issues, and mimetic theory, and has recently co-authored and published an academic writing textbook for EFL students with Cengage Learning.