Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology by Gans, Eric Lawrence - 1993

Stanford Univ Pr, 1993. hardcover. Acceptable/Good. 6x0x9. 1993 Stanford University Press (Stanford, California), 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches tall pale orange cloth hardcover in publisher's unclipped dust jacket, red lettering to spine, ix, 225 pp. Very slight rubbing and edgewear to covers. Neat, light pencil underlining and marginalia throughout by the prior owner, a respected theatre professor at USC. Despite this, still an excellent reading/reference copy of this uncommon work, in a slightly creased and edgeworn dust jacket which is nicely preserved and displayed in a clear archival Brodart sleeve. ~P~ [1.5P] Originary Thinking deals with generative anthropology, a radically new conception of human science founded on the hypothesis that humanity emerged in a communal event in which intraspecific violence was deferred by the production of a linguistic sign. The author pursues in the areas of religion, ethics, philosophy of language, theory of discourse, and aesthetics, the exploration begun in his The Origin of Language (1981) and continued in The End of Culture (1985) and Science and Faith (1990). The present volume adds two significant new elements: (1) originary analysis-a methodology for rethinking the fundamental categories of the human in terms of the originary scene. On the basis of an originary model of aesthetic experience, the author presents an outline of Western aesthetic history from the classical era to the postmodern. The fundamental premise behind Originary Thinking is that the return to the specificity of a scene of origin is the necessary guarantee of openness in human science. Contents: 1. Introduction; pt. 1. Originary Analysis; 2. The Anthropological Idea of God; 3. Morality and Ethics; 4. A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts; 5. The Origin of Fiction; 6. Narrativity and Textuality; pt. 2. Esthetic History; 7. Originary Esthetics; 8. High Art and the Classical Esthetic; 9. The Neoclassical Esthetic; 10. The Romantic Esthetic; 11. The Modernist Esthetic; 12. The Postmodern Esthetic.