The conference theme is "The Anthropology of Modernity: the Sacred, Science, and Aesthetics." One special guest will be Vincent Pecora, the Gordon B. Hinckley Professor of British Studies at the University of Utah and author of Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation and Modernity (U Chicago P, 2006). A collaborative effort of people from two institutions, the conference will be held on the campuses of Westminster College in Salt Lake City and Brigham Young University in Provo (Utah). Abstracts for papers of 20 minutes should be sent by attachment in MS-Word or Word Perfect to Professor Bob Hudson, bob_hudson@byu.edu or Professor Peter Goldman, pgoldman@westminstercollege.edu . Deadline: March 1st, 2010.
Ian Dennis, Guest Editor -
Introduction
Hosted by Ian Dennis (Chief Organizer) and Amir Kahn (Assistant) at the University of Ottawa this past June 19-21 (2009), the third consecutive GA Summer Conference was the biggest, brightest, best yet. Thirty-five speakers presented papers at a total of thirteen panels spread over three days. We were treated to thinking that brought GA into dialogue with figures including Plato, Emmanuel Levinas, Shakespeare, Wagner, Blake, Byron, Nerval, George Eliot, Robert Browning, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Dacre, Frank Connor, Ernst Gellner, Jacques Maritain, and Richard Dawkins. We saw GA brought into context with topics such as political violence, romanticism, morphogenetic fields, atheism as fundamentalism, the cognitive science of religion, romanticism, the history of Western painting, education, documentalism, and originary advertising. Three plenary sessions pleased all: Mark Vessey's wide-ranging lecture on the idea of the book from Augustine to Northrop Frye (Friday evening), Eric Gans's "Language as Transcendence" (late Saturday afternoon), and Andrew McKenna's "Art and Incarnation" (Sunday afternoon). Participants enjoyed Ottawa sunshine, good company and fine food, including that served at the Saturday night banquet at The Social on Sussex Drive. Alliances professional were created, renewed, and nourished.
Congratulations to Professor Dennis and Mr. Kahn for their terrific accomplishment. Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support.
Congratulations to Ian Dennis, whose new book Lord Byron and the History of Desire has just been published by the University of Delaware Press (2009). Quoting from the publisher's website: "This book interprets a number of Lord Byron's major literary works--Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1813, 1816, 1818), the Eastern Tales (1812-16), "Prometheus" (1816), "The Prisoner of Chillon" (1816), Manfred (1817), Cain (1821), Heaven and Earth (1823) and Don Juan (1819-24)--from a perspective informed by the Generative Anthropology of Eric Gans and the mimetic theory of Rene Girard. It reads these works for their developing awareness of the market world in which the poet lived--the changing nexus of socially mediated desires--but also for their modeling of attitudes and rhetorics useful for life in such a world, with particular attention to Byronic irony and its purposes."
Congratulations to Richard Van Oort, whose new book The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics has just been released (2009) by The Davies Group Publishers. A description from their website: the book "seeks to answer the question: What knowledge does the humanist possess that can compete with the explanatory power of evolutionary theory? Drawing on Eric Gans's groundbreaking idea of language as the deferral of violence, Van Oort situates this 'originary hypothesis' in the context of recent studies in primatology, developmental psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and cognitive science. The point of this comparison is not to reduce the humanities to the sciences, but to delimit a minimal point of departure for humanistic inquiry. Having established this starting point, Van Oort compares the premises of the originary hypothesis to the unavowed starting points of recent cultural and literary criticism. He shows that the theory is not incompatible with the best insights of either Clifford Geertz or Stephen Greenblatt. The hypothesis is further fleshed out in original readings of Shakespeare, tragedy, and romanticism."
In November and December 2008, Eric Gans delivered lectures and held seminars in Australia (University of Sydney, University of Western Sydney) and at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. Thanks to Diego Bubbio and Chris Fleming (Australia) and Roman Katsman (Israel) for organizing these visits.
Raoul Eshelman, a frequent contributor to Anthropoetics, has just published Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group). It is now available on Amazon.com for $27.
Introduction:
Adam Katz, The Consequences
of the Originary Hypothesis.
1: Eric Gans, Originary Thinking in the New
Millennium.
2: Raoul Eshelman, Originary Aesthetics and
the End of Postmodernism.
3: Christopher Morrissey, Immaterial
Intellect and the Originary Scene.
4: Adam Katz, The Question of Originary
Method: The Generative Thought Experiment.
5:
Eric Gans, The Anthropology of Bronx
Romanticism.
6: Richard van Oort, Hamlet's Theater
of Resentment.
7: Peter Goldman, Shakespeare's
Iconoclasm: Public vs. Private Scenes in Measure for Measure.
8:
Thomas Bertonneau, From Epicurus to
Marx: The Horizon of Materialist Anthropology in light of the
Minimal Scene.
9:
Matthew Schneider, Romanticism and the
Evolution of Popular Culture.
10:
Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll, What is the Human? Generative Anthropology and
the Humanities.
11: Andrew Bartlett, Accusations of "Playing God" and the Anthropological Idea of God.
Eric Gans's latest book, The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day, is available at Stanford University Press.
GA in Croatia
Anthropoetics is pleased to
announce HUGA (Hrvatska Udruga za Generativnu Antropologiju),
the Croatian Association for Generative Anthropology). HUGA was founded on July
30, 2006 in Zagreb, Croatia. Its mission is to explore and develop GA and
mimetic theory. HUGA's board members include Antun Pavešković
(president), Tatjana Pavešković
(vice-president), Silva Mežnarić, and Joško Božanić.
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