Shadow Songs

This book confronts growing concerns about the quality of our civic discourse, the problems we do and do not take up as a people and as human beings. The most important being the survival of life on the planet. To get at such issues requires not only new approaches to criticism, but also a more profound sense about what it means to be a critic.

Topics range from the place of the "I" in scholarship, strategies for re-humanizing dehumanized peoples, politics in poetry and philosophy, 9/11 and global reality in the 21st century, morality and the second invasion of Iraq, ecology and the rhetoric of science.