Product Description: The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In Deconstructing Dignity, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philosophically...read more

Product Description: The Work and the Gift considers how working and giving are taken for opposites and revealed as each other's ghostly shadow. We ask ourselves, for instance, to work for a wage and a living, dooming ourselves forever to the curse of daily toil; and yet we imagine the magnum opus or the oeuvre as a labor of love...read more

Product Description: Scott Cutler Shershow explores the historical relationship between puppet theater and the human stage from the Renaissance to the present. Focusing on the ways in which various modes of bourgeois discourse have used the puppet as metaphor, paradigm of theatrical performance, or symbol of subordination, he maintains that "elite" and "popular" forms of culture are inextricably linked...read more

Product Description: This book explores the paradoxes of theatrical comedy which emerge both in comic theater and in efforts to discern its meaning. Scott Cutler Shershow views comedy not only as the classical "mirror of nature," but also as a tradition of performance whose familiar conventions reflect our own opposing visions of human life: criticism or acceptance of the world, cynicism or optimism, derision or forgiveness...read more