“Mysteries
should not be
multiplied
beyond
necessity.”
The Origin of Language
remains as completely original and unprecedented (and intellectually demanding and satisfying) today
as when it was originally published,
so much so as to constitute
a kind of intellectual scandal.
Eric Gans is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught 19th-century French literature for 45 years. He is the author of two critical studies on Flaubert, including Madame Bovary: The End of Romance (G.K. Hall, 1989), and (in French) of book-length essays on Alfred de Musset and Prosper Mérimée. His theoretical works include Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures (Stanford University Press, 1997) and A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art (The Davies Group, 2011). He lives in Santa Monica, California.
Adam Katz is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, and the co-author, with Eric Gans, of The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism. He has written numerous essays for Anthropoetics, the Journal of Generative Anthropology, and a foreword for the new edition of Eric Gans’s Science and Faith. He has written on the fiction of Ronald Sukenick and the work of Primo Levi. He teaches college writing in Connecticut.
