Playful parodies by the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Here, Eco pokes fun at the oversophisticated, overacademic, and overintellectual, and along the way makes penetrating comments about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde in art in criticism.

Brandon O'Brien and Randy Richards shed light on the ways that Western readers often misunderstand the cultural dynamics of the Bible. Identifying nine areas where commonplaces of modern Western thought diverge with the text, the authors ask us to reconsider long-held opinions about our most beloved book.

Perhaps more than any philosophy written in the past few centuries, the work of Friedrich Nietzsche has given rise to controversy, misunderstanding, and dissent. Today Nietzsche is remembered as the revolutionary author of such polemical ideas as the death of God, the revaluation of values, the will to untruth, and the Übermensch. Yet is Nietzsche’s philosophy as atheistic, relativistic, nihilistic, and immoral as some commentators have claimed? Or ought we perhaps to give more credence to Nietzsche’s own assertion that one writes books “precisely to conceal what one harbors” (BGE, 9, 289)? If “whatever is profound loves masks” (BGE, 2, 40) then might Nietzsche’s more daring claims be interpreted as clever masks behind which he conceals a deeper philosophy and on which he reveals a hidden truth? Is it not possible that the standard readings of Nietzsche are in fact misreadings—that his work invites misreading, that it is intentionally unclear, deceptive, disguised? The goal of this volume is to reread Nietzsche for all that he shows and all that he hides. It is to dig deeper into his work in order to challenge misreadings of old and invite misreadings anew—as, indeed, his work itself calls for and demands.

An intriguing 1996 study showing how Africans enrich their land, while scientists believe they damage it.

(Mis)readings of Marx In Continental Philosophy reflects on the way major European philosophers related to the work of Karl Marx. It brings together leading and emerging critical theorists to address the readings of Marx offered by Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Negri, Badiou, Agamben, Rancière, Latour and Žižek.

In his own time, Shakespeare was best known to the reading public as a poet, and even today copies of his Sonnets regularly outsell everything else he wrote. For this new edition, Stephen Orgel offers a warmly personal and original introduction to Shakespeare's best-loved and most widely read poems. Careful readings emphasize their sexual and temperamental ambiguity, their textual history and the special perils an editor faces when modernizing the original quarto's spelling, punctuation, and even layout. The edition retains the text of the Sonnets prepared by Gwynne Evans, together with his detailed notes on each, and a line-by-line commentary. Throughout, the 'voices' of the sonnets appear in all their intricacy and dramatic power.