Anthropoetics VI, 1 Benchmarks
This is largely a French issue; three of our four
articles deal with French subjects. Jeffrey Spisak's article
on mimetic desire in Rousseau was revised from a graduate
paper; Scott Sprenger's study of Balzac's anthropology
is part of his book project on Balzac; and Eric Gans's text on
Durkheim was his contribution to a recent colloquium
on "Transfiguring the Sacred," sponsored by the UCLA Humanities
Consortium (under whose auspices Scott Sprenger was
chosen last year from over a hundred candidates to spend two years at UCLA on
a Mellon Fellowship). For a little extra-terrestrial
variety, we also include Tom Bertonneau's article on the anti-sacrificial in
science fiction, our first article in a field which is one of Tom's many
specialties.
About our Contributors
Tom Bertonneau, an original member of the GA seminar, received
his Ph.D. from UCLA in Comparative Literature in 1990. His dissertation applied
GA to the study of the modern epic: William Carlos Williams' Paterson and Stéphane
Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés..." Since then he has published and presented papers
on Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, and other American authors, as well
as on theoretical topics (and science fiction). Tom has also written for Heterodoxy,
Chronicles, Academic Questions, and National Review, and
is well known in Michigan for his controversial writings on college English teaching.
Jeffrey Spisak is a doctoral student at UCLA whose research
interests include theatricality and patterns of mimetic identification in Early
Modern French literature, Rousseau, and French Canadian literature. He presented
a paper entitled "Québécois Nationalism and Ethnic Unease: the 1995 Sovereignty
Debate" at the 1997 Chimera Conference at the University of Washington.
Scott Sprenger is Assistant
Professor of French at Brigham Young University; he is currently an Andrew W.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Consortium at UCLA. He has published
several articles on 19th- and 20th-century French literature and is currently
completing a book on Balzac titled The Scandal of Balzac's Realism.
Eric Gans is Editor of
Anthropoetics and Professor of French at UCLA. His CV is accessible
by clicking on his name below.
Eric
Gans /
anthro@humnet.ucla.edu
Last updated 6/9/00