Books in the Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities series

This book approaches David Foster Wallace not only as a fiction writer but also as a cultural critic and a moral philosopher whose formal innovations were intended as "therapies" for the pervasive dis-eases of our time.

This book makes a case for the acknowledgment and cultivation of poetic thinking-the kind of thinking we find in literature and the arts-for their uninhibited wisdom is vital for the protection of our social, political, and cultural freedom.

This book argues that love is a practice through we make sense of fundamental questions-from the propagation of life, to the inevitability of death. Acts of love not only reflect current social values but instead make new social realities, such as feminism or same-sex marriage, come into being and thus help us to explain immense historical shifts.

Cavarero refutes a long-standing set of assumptions in moral philosophy by contesting the classical figure of the homo erectus or 'upright man,' and by proposing a feminist, altruistic, open model of the subject-one inclined toward others.

This book on Shakespeare's language is the first to explore how we modern American or English-speaking readers hear, understand, fail to understand, are amused, disturbed, bored, moved, and challenged by it today.