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Scott C. Shershow Professor of English

BA, Yale University, 1975
BA, New College, Oxford University, 1977
MA, PhD, Harvard University, 1983

Scott Cutler Shershow is Professor of English and director of the Graduate Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. His current research focuses on the application of deconstruction to contemporary legal and political issues. He has recently been collaborating with Scott Michaelsen of Michigan State University on a series of interrelated articles addressing issues such as welfare, affirmative action, torture, the Guantanamo detainees, and the vexed relation of state secrecy and personal privacy. He has earlier also published on topics in the history and theory of drama, popular culture, and early-modern theater.

Publication Spotlight

The Work and the Gift by Scott C. Shershow "An acute and multifaceted approach to a burning debate where is put into play our present civilization and its future."        -- Jean-Joseph Goux, Rice            University The Work and the Gift considers how, in a wide range of western culture and thought, the ideas of working and giving remain locked in a fatal dilemma, each one representing the other's aspiration and absolute limit. Ranging from Marx and Derrida to Friedrich Hayek and Alvin Toffler, this book explores, among other things: the predictions of social thinkers on both the Right and the Left about a coming crisis of work; the debates among anthropologists and historians about an archaic gift-economy that preceded capitalism and might re-emerge in its wake; contemporary political battles over charity and social welfare; and attempts by modern and postmodern artists to destabilize the Work of art. The book also finally envisions, beyond these self-defeating oppositions of work and gift, a community of unworking, grounded neither in ideals of production and progress, nor even in an ethic of liberal generosity, but simply in our fundamental being-in-common.

Publications

In collaboration with Scott Michaelsen:

• "Is Nothing Secret?" Forthcoming, Discourse, Winter 2007.
• "Rethinking Border Thinking." Forthcoming, South Atlantic Quarterly 10:1 (Spring 2007).
• "Does Torture Have a Future?" boundary 2 33:3 (2006): 161-197.
• "Why Work on Rights? Citizenship, Welfare and Property in Empire and Beyond." Theory and Event 8:4, (2005).
• "Beyond or Before the Law at Guantanamo." Peace Review 16:3 (Fall 2004).
• "Practical Politics at the Limits of Community: The Cases of Affirmative Action and Welfare." Postmodern Culture 12:2 (March, 2002).

Other recent publications:

• The Work and the Gift. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• "Of Sinking: Marxism and the 'General' Economy." Critical Inquiry 27:3 (Spring 2001): 486-492.
• "Myth and Nihilism in the Discourse of Globalization." CR: The New Centennial
  Review, 1.1 (2001): 257-282.
• Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Puppets and "Popular" Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.