This volume of presents an account of current thinking on central issues within and beyond the humanities. It brings together such leading figures as Sacvan Bercovitch and Helen Vendler, Anthony Appiah and Barbara Johnson, Seyla Benhabib and Norman Bryson, Martha Minow and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Marjorie Garber and Susan Suleiman. It explores such questions as: What is culture? What are cultures? Are literary texts and cultural texts different? What do literary and other fields engaged in cultural work have in common? What can literary studies profitably do with other disciplines? and What...

The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts - and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written.

Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures - metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting of us, and in particular theorists such Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - the figure of Shakespeare constantly made and remade by contemporary culture.

Marjorie Garber, one of the most eminent...

In Loaded Words the inimitable literary and cultural critic Marjorie Garber invites readers to join her in a rigorous and exuberant exploration of language. What links the pieces included in this vibrant new collection is the author's contention that all words are inescapably loaded--that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming--and that such loading is what makes language matter. Garber casts her keen eye on terms from knowledge, belief, madness, interruption, genius, and celebrity to humanities, general education, and academia. Included here are...