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Shugendo
Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion
Miyake Hitoshi; Edited and with an Introduction by H. Byron Earhart
University of Michigan Press, 2001
This volume of essays is the first comprehensive publication in English of the work of Miyake Hitoshi, a distinguished scholar of Shugendō (mountain asceticism) and one of the foremost researchers on Japanese folk religion. Miyake defines folk religion as “religion that merges from the necessities of community life.” In Miyake’s systematic methodological and theoretical approach, Shugendō is a classic example of Japanese folk religion, for it blends many traditions (shamanism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Shinto) into a distinctive Japanese religious worldview and is typical of Japanese religion generally.
The first part of this book is devoted to Shugendō’s history, organization, ritual, austerities, thought, and cosmology. Related subjects include exorcism and the exclusion of women. The second part of the book provides research and reflection on Japanese folk religion, including essays on the idea of nature, worldly benefits, new religions, death and rebirth, and the structure of folk religion.
Shugendō: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion clarifies much of the logic behind Japanese religious syncretism. It is essential reading not only for those interested in Japanese history, culture, and religion but also for those studying world religions and folk culture.
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The Sian Incident
A Pivotal Point in Modern Chinese History
Tien-wei Wu
University of Michigan Press, 1976
When Chiang Kai-shek arrived at Sian in the fall of 1936 and laid plans for launching his last campaign against the Red Army with an expectation of exterminating it in a month, he badly misjudged the mood of the Tungpei (Northeast) Army and more so its leader, Chang Hsueh-liang, better known as the Young Marshal. Refusing to fight the Communists, Chang with the loyal support of his officers staged a coup d’état by kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek for two weeks at Sian. Almost forty years after the melodrama was over, the Sian Incident still absorbs much attention from both Chinese and Western scholars as well as the reading public.
The Sian Incident attempts to bring together whatever information has been thus far gleaned about the subject, and to cover all aspects and controversies involved in it. [1, xi, xii]
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Sightlines
Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre
Helen Gilbert
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre asserts the centrality of theater to the ongoing negotiations of the Australian context. By exploring ways in which ideas about race, gender, and nation are expressed in concrete theatrical contexts, the performative qualities of theatrical representation are revealed as compelling, important sites of critique.
Helen Gilbert discusses an exciting variety of plays, drawing examples from marginalized groups as well as from the theatrical mainstream. While fully engaged with the discourses of contemporary critical thought, Sightlines remains focused on the material stuff of the theater, grounding its discussion in the visual elements of costume, movement, and scenography. And although focused specifically on performance, the author's insistent interest in historical and political contexts also speaks to the broader concerns of cultural studies.
The book's recurrent concern with representations of Aboriginality, particularly in the works of nonindigenous playwrights, draws attention to racial politics as a perennial motif in postcolonial nations. Its illumination of the relationships between patriarchy and imperialism is supported by an extensive discussion of plays by and about women. This nomadic approach marks Sightlines as a groundbreaking study of recent Australian theater, a provocative application of postcolonial theory to the embodied qualities of theatrical representation.
"An impressive and ground-breaking study that provides a coherent postcolonial approach to Australian drama." --Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales
"Elegantly written, and always beautifully lucid in its argument. . . . this is a very original work, particularly in its marriage of performance theory and postcolonial analysis." --Deidre Coleman, University of Sydney
Helen Gilbert is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies, University of Queensland, and co-author, with Joanne Tompkins, of Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics.
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Signaling Goodness
Social Rules and Public Choice
Phillip J. Nelson and Kenneth V. Greene
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Political, intellectual, and academic discourse in the United States has been awash in political correctness, which has itself been berated and defended -- yet little understood. As a corrective, Nelson and Greene look at a more general process: adopting political positions to enhance one's reputation for trustworthiness both to others and to oneself.
Phillip Nelson and Kenneth Greene are Professors of Economics in the Department of Economics at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
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Signifying Bodies
Disability in Contemporary Life Writing
G. Thomas Couser
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Thomas Couser's Signifying Bodies comes at a crucial moment when debates about physician assisted suicide, genetic engineering, and neo-natal screening are raising the question of what constitutes a 'life worth living' for persons with disabilities. Couser's work engages these debates by exploring the extensive number of personal narratives by or about persons with disabilities. As Couser brilliantly demonstrates through synoptic readings, these works challenge the 'preferred rhetorics' by which such narratives are usually written (triumphalist, gothic, nostalgic) while making visible the variegated nature of embodied life."
---Michael Davidson, University of California, San Diego

"Signifying Bodies shows us that life writing about disability is . . . everywhere. . . . From obituary to documentary film to ethnography to literary memoir to the law, the book casts a wide net, detailing how various written and filmed responses to disability both enact and resist conventional narrative patterns. [This] not only broadens our idea about where to look for life writing, but also demonstrates how thoroughly stereotypes about disability mediate our social and artistic languages---even when an author has (so-called) the best intentions."
---Susannah B. Mintz, Skidmore College

Memoirs have enjoyed great popularity in recent years, experiencing significant sales, prominent reviews, and diverse readerships. Signifying Bodies shows that at the heart of the memoir phenomenon is our fascination with writing that focuses on what it means to live in, or be, an anomalous body---in other words, what it means to be disabled. Previous literary accounts of the disabled body have often portrayed it as a stable entity possibly signifying moral deviance or divine disfavor, but contemporary writers with disabilities are defining themselves and depicting their bodies in new ways. Using the insights of disability studies and source material ranging from the Old and New Testaments to the works of authors like Lucy Grealy and Simi Linton and including contemporary films such as Million Dollar Baby, G. Thomas Couser sheds light on a broader cultural phenomenon, exploring topics such as the ethical issues involved in disability memoirs, the rhetorical patterns they frequently employ, and the complex relationship between disability narrative and disability law.

G. Thomas Couser is Professor of English at Hofstra University.

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The Silent Guns of Two Octobers
Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game
Theodore Voorhees, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2021

The Silent Guns of Two Octobers uses new as well as previously under-appreciated documentary evidence to link the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff to achieve the impossible—craft a new, thoughtful, original analysis of a political showdown everyone thought they knew everything about. Ultimately the book concludes that much of the Cold War rhetoric the leaders employed was mere posturing; in reality neither had any intention of starting a nuclear war. Theodore Voorhees reexamines Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s leadership, decision, and rhetoric in light of the new documentary evidence available. Voorhees examines the impact of John F. Kennedy's domestic political concerns about his upcoming first midterm elections on his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis through his use of back-channel dealings with Khrushchev during the lead-up to the crisis and in the closing days when the two leaders managed to reach a settlement.

[more]

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The Silent Guns of Two Octobers
Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game
Theodore Voorhees, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2020

The Silent Guns of Two Octobers uses new as well as previously under-appreciated documentary evidence to link the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff to achieve the impossible—craft a new, thoughtful, original analysis of a political showdown everyone thought they knew everything about. Ultimately the book concludes that much of the Cold War rhetoric the leaders employed was mere posturing; in reality neither had any intention of starting a nuclear war. Theodore Voorhees reexamines Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s leadership, decision, and rhetoric in light of the new documentary evidence available. Voorhees examines the impact of John F. Kennedy's domestic political concerns about his upcoming first midterm elections on his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis through his use of back-channel dealings with Khrushchev during the lead-up to the crisis and in the closing days when the two leaders managed to reach a settlement.

[more]

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Silent Hill
The Terror Engine
Bernard Perron
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, the second of the two inaugural studies in the Landmark Video Games series from series editors Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, is both a close analysis of the first three Silent Hill games and a general look at the whole series. Silent Hill, with its first title released in 1999, is one of the most influential of the horror video game series. Perron situates the games within the survival horror genre, both by looking at the history of the genre and by comparing Silent Hill with such important forerunners as Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. Taking a transmedia approach and underlining the designer's cinematic and literary influences, he uses the narrative structure; the techniques of imagery, sound, and music employed; the game mechanics; and the fiction, artifact, and gameplay emotions elicited by the games to explore the specific fears survival horror games are designed to provoke and how the experience as a whole has made the Silent Hill series one of the major landmarks of video game history.

[more]

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Simming
Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning
Scott Magelssen
University of Michigan Press, 2014

At an ecopark in Mexico, tourists pretend to be illegal migrants, braving inhospitable terrain and the U.S. Border Patrol as they attempt to cross the border. At a living history museum in Indiana, daytime visitors return after dark to play fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. In the Mojave Desert, the U.S. Army simulates entire provinces of Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with bustling villages, insurgents, and Arabic-speaking townspeople, to train soldiers for deployment to the Middle East. At a nursing home, trainees put on fogged glasses and earplugs, thick bands around their finger joints, and sandbag harnesses to simulate the effects of aging and to gain empathy for their patients.

These immersive environments in which spectator-participants engage in simulations of various kinds—or “simming”—are the subject of Scott Magelssen’s book. His book lays out the ways in which simming can provide efficacy and promote social change through affective, embodied testimony. Using methodology from theater history and performance studies (particularly as these fields intersect with cultural studies, communication, history, popular culture, and American studies), Magelssen explores the ways these representational practices produce, reify, or contest cultural and societal perceptions of identity.

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Simulacra and Simulation
Jean Baudrillard
University of Michigan Press, 1994
The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernist thought
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Sing to the Colors
A Writer Explores Two Centuries at the University of Michigan
James Tobin
University of Michigan Press, 2021
In Sing to the Colors, award-winning author James Tobin considers ideas of place, tradition, legacy, and pride while investigating two centuries of history at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. The book’s 23 essays capture a series of moments—some well-known and celebrated, others inconspicuous or even troubling—that have contributed to the ongoing evolution of the University. Readers travel back to bitter battles fought over the vision for the University in its early years and learn how the Diag and other campus landmarks came to be. Other chapters consider milestones on the University’s continuing journey toward greater inclusivity such as the 1970 Black Action Movement strike and the enrollment of Michigan’s first female students in the 1870s. Still others illuminate the complex relationship between the University and the city of Ann Arbor, revisiting former mainstays like the Pretzel Bell and Drake’s Sandwich Shop. Alongside these stories, Tobin grapples with his own understanding of and connection to Michigan’s history, which—whatever its imperfections and errors—has shaped the lives of thousands of alumni around the world. This is a book for readers who not only cherish the University of Michigan but who also want to better understand the long work of the many generations who envisioned and built and sustained the place.
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Singing Out
GALA Choruses and Social Change
Heather MacLachlan
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Can you change the world through song? This appealing idea has long been the professed aim of singers who are part of choruses affiliated with the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA). Theses choruses first emerged in the 1970s, and grew out of a very American tradition of (often gender-segregated) choral singing that explicitly presents itself as a community-based activity. By taking a close look at these choruses and their mission, Heather MacLachlan unpacks the fascinating historical and cultural dynamics behind groups that seek to change society for the better by encouraging acceptance of LGBT-identified people and promoting diversity more generally. She characterizes their mission as “integrationist rather than liberationist” and zeroes in on the inherent tension between GALA’s progressive social goals and the fact that the music most often performed by GALA groups is deeply rooted in a fairly narrowly conceived tradition of art music that identifies as white, Euro-centric, and middle class--and that much of the membership identifies as white and middle class as well.

Pundits often wax eloquent about the power of music, asserting that it can, in some positive way, change the world. Such statements often rest on an unexamined claim that music can and does foster social justice. Singing Out: GALA Choruses and Social Change tackles the premise underlying such claims, analyzing groups of amateur singers who are explicitly committed to an agenda of social justice.

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Singing the Land
Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America
Eli Sperling
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America examines the proliferation and use of popular Hebrew Zionist music amongst American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. This music—one part in a greater process of instilling diasporic Zionism in American Jewish communities—represents an early and underexplored means of fostering mainstream American Jewish engagement with the Jewish state and Hebrew national culture as they emerged after Israel declared its independence in 1948. This evolutionary process brought Zionism from being an often-polemical notion in American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century to a mainstream component of American Jewish life by 1948. Hebrew music ultimately emerged as an important means through which many American Jews physically participated in or ‘performed’ aspects of Zionism and Hebrew national culture from afar.   

Exploring the history, events, contexts, and tensions that comprised what may be termed the ‘Zionization’ of American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century, Eli Sperling analyzes primary sources within the historical contexts of Zionist national development and American Jewish life. Singing the Land offers insights into how and why musical frameworks were central to catalyzing American Jewry’s support of the Zionist cause by the 1940s, parallel to firm commitments to their American locale and national identities. The proliferation of this widespread American Jewish-Zionist embrace was achieved through a variety of educational, religious, economic, and political efforts, and Hebrew music was a thread consistent among them all.   
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Siren Songs
Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey
Lillian Eileen Doherty
University of Michigan Press, 1995
In Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey, Lillian Eileen Doherty shows us that the attitude of Odysseus, as well as of the Odyssey, is highly ambivalent toward women. Odysseus rewards supportive female characters by treating them as privileged members of the audience for his own tales. At the same time, dangerous female narrators--who threaten to disrupt or revise the hero's story--are discredited by the narrative framework in which their stories appear.
Siren Songs synthesizes audience-oriented and narratological approaches, and examines the relationships among three kinds of audiences: internal, implied, and actual. The author prefaces her own reading of the Odyssey with an analysis of the issues posed by the earlier feminist readings on which she builds. Should the Odyssey be read as a "closed" text, that is, as one whose meaning is highly determined, or as an "open" text whose contradictions and ambiguities undercut its overt meanings?
Siren Songs presents a feminist critique of the Odyssey in an accessible manner aimed at a more general audience. All Greek is translated, and critical terminology is clearly defined.
Lillian Eileen Doherty is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Maryland, College Park.
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Sit-Down
The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937
Sidney Fine
University of Michigan Press, 2020
In this classic study, Sidney Fine portrays the dramatic events of the 1936–37 Flint Sit-down Strike against General Motors, which catapulted the UAW into prominence and touched off a wave of sit-down strikes across the United States. Basing his account on an impressive variety of manuscript sources, Fine analyzes the strategy and tactics of GM and the UAW, describes the life of the workers in the occupied plants, and examines the troubled governmental and public reaction to the alleged breakdown of law and order in the strikes. In addition, Fine provides vivid portraits of the major figures on both sides of the conflict: Governor Frank Murphy; Alfred Sloan, Jr.; William Knudsen; Robert Travis; Roy, Victor, and Walter Reuther; Homer Martin; and Wyndham Mortimer. The GM sit-down strike marks the close of one era of labor-management relations in the United States and the beginning of another. A half century after its initial publication, Fine’s work remains the definitive account of that momentous conflict. A new foreword by Kim Moody’s revisits Sit-Down in order to demonstrate its continued relevance to today’s unions, workers, and activists.
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Sit-Down
The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937
Sidney Fine
University of Michigan Press, 1969

In the first documented book-length study of this violent confrontation, Sidney Fine portrays the dramatic events of the 1936-37 strike that catapulted the UAW into prominence and touched off a wave of sit-down strikes across the land. Basing his account on an impressive variety of manuscript sources, the author analyzes the strategy and tactics of GM and the UAW, describes the life of the workers in the occupied plants, and examines the troubled governmental and public reaction to the alleged breakdown of law and order in the strikes. In addition, Dr. Fine provides vivid portraits of Governor Frank Murphy and the major figures on both sides of the conflict: Alfred Sloan, Jr., William Knudson, Robert Travis, Roy Victor, and Walter Reuther, Homer Martin, and Wyndham Mortimer. Of particular interest today are the author's concluding remarks regarding the similarities between the sit-down strike movement of the 1930's and the civil rights movement and the college sit-ins of our own era.

The GM sit-down strike marks the close of one era of labor-management relations in the United States and the beginning of another. Professor Fine has provided us with the definitive account of that momentous conflict.

[more]

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Sites of Translation
What Multilinguals Can Teach Us about Digital Writing and Rhetoric
Laura Gonzales
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Winner of the 2016 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize

Sites of Translation illustrates the intricate rhetorical work that multilingual communicators engage in as they translate information for their communities. Blending ethnographic and empirical methods from multiple disciplines, Laura Gonzales provides methodological examples of how linguistic diversity can be studied in practice, both in and outside the classroom, and provides insights into the rhetorical labor that is often unacknowledged and made invisible in multilingual communication. Sites of Translation is relevant to researchers and teachers of writing as well as technology designers interested in creating systems, pedagogies, and platforms that will be more accessible and useful to multilingual audiences. Gonzales presents multilingual communication as intellectual labor that should be further valued in both academic and professional spaces, and supported by multilingual technologies and pedagogies that center the expertise of linguistically diverse communicators.
 

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The Sixties, Center Stage
Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade
Edited by James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Sixties, Center Stage offers rich insights into the innovative and provocative political underpinnings of mainstream and popular performances in the 1960s. While much critical attention has been focused on experimental and radical theater of the period, the essays confirm that mainstream performances not only merit more scholarly attention than they have received, but through serious examination provide an important key to understanding the 1960s as a period.
 
The introduction provides a broad overview of the social, political, and cultural contexts of artistic practices in mainstream theater from the mid-fifties to mid-seventies. Readers will find detailed examinations of the mainstream’s surprising attention to craft and innovation; to the rich exchange between European and American theatres; to the rise of regional theaters; and finally, to popular cultural performances that pushed the conceptual boundaries of mainstream institutions. The book looks afresh at productions of Hair, Cabaret, Raisin in the Sun, and Fiddler on the Roof, as well as German theater, and performances outside the Democratic National Convention of 1968.
 

[more]

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Skate Life
Re-Imagining White Masculinity
Emily Chivers Yochim
University of Michigan Press, 2009

"Intellectually deft and lively to read, Skate Life is an important addition to the literature on youth cultures, contemporary masculinity, and the role of media in identity formation."
---Janice A. Radway, Northwestern University, author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature

"With her elegant research design and sophisticated array of anthropological and media studies approaches, Emily Chivers Yochim has produced one of the best books about race, gender, and class that I have read in the last ten years. In a moment where celebratory studies of youth, youth subcultures, and their relationship to media abound, this book stands as a brilliantly argued analysis of the limitations of youth subcultures and their ambiguous relationship to mainstream commercial culture."
---Ellen Seiter, University of Southern California

"Yochim has made a valuable contribution to media and cultural studies as well as youth and American studies by conducting this research and by coining the phrase 'corresponding cultures,' which conceptualizes the complex and dynamic processes skateboarders employ to negotiate their identities as part of both mainstream and counter-cultures."
---JoEllen Fisherkeller, New York University

Skate Life examines how young male skateboarders use skate culture media in the production of their identities. Emily Chivers Yochim offers a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, skateboarding community, situating it within a larger historical examination of skateboarding's portrayal in mainstream media and a critique of mainstream, niche, and locally produced media texts (such as, for example, Jackass, Viva La Bam, and Dogtown and Z-Boys). The book uses these elements to argue that adolescent boys can both critique dominant norms of masculinity and maintain the power that white heterosexual masculinity offers. Additionally, Yochim uses these analyses to introduce the notion of "corresponding cultures," conceptualizing the ways in which media audiences both argue with and incorporate mediated images into their own ideas about identity. In a strong combination of anthropological and media studies approaches, Skate Life asks important questions of the literature on youth and provides new ways of assessing how young people create their identities.

Emily Chivers Yochim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts, Allegheny College.

Cover design by Brian V. Smith

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Skin Deep, Spirit Strong
The Black Female Body in American Culture
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The essays in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture chart the ways that the simultaneous interrogation of gender, race, and corporeality shape the construction of black female representation. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders has enlisted a wide variety of scholarly perspectives and critical approaches about the place of black women's bodies within the American cultural consciousness. An impressive gathering of essays and visual art by feminist scholars and artists, the book presents a persuasive argument for broadening the ongoing scholarly conversations about the body. It makes clear that the most salient discourses in poststructuralist and feminist theory are made richer and more complex when the black female body is considered.
The collection blends original and classic essays to reveal the interconnections among art, literature, public policy, the history of medicine, and theories about sexuality with regard to bodies that are both black and female. Contributors include Rachel Adams, Elizabeth Alexander, Lisa Collins, Bridgette Davis, Lisa E.Farrington, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Evelynn Hammonds, Terri Kapsalis, Jennifer L. Morgan, Siobhan B. Somerville, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Carla Williams, and Doris Witt.
Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture will appeal to both the academic reader attempting to integrate race into discussion about the female body and to the general reader curious about the history of black female representation.
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and Institute of Women's Studies, Emory University.
[more]

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The Skin of Meaning
Collected Literary Essays and Talks
Aaron Shurin
University of Michigan Press, 2016
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

In The Skin of Meaning, Aaron Shurin has collected thirty years’ worth of his provocative essays. Fueled by gender and queer studies and combined with radical traditions in poetry, Shurin’s essays combine a highly personal and lyrical vision with a trenchant social analysis of poetry’s possibilities. Whether he’s examining innovations in poetic form, analyzing the gestures of drag queens, or dissecting the language of AIDS, Shurin’s writing is evocative, his investigations rigorous, and his point of view unabashed.

Shurin’s poetic practice braids together many strands in contemporary, innovative writing, from the San Francisco Renaissance to Language Poetry and New Narrative Writing. His mentorships with Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov; his studies at New College of California, where he was the first graduate of the epochal Poetics Program; and his years of teaching writing provide a rich background for these essays. San Francisco provides the color and context for formulations of “prosody now,” propositions of textual collage, and theories of radical narrativity, while the heart of the book searches through the dire years of the AIDS epidemic to uncover poetic meaning, and “make the heroes heroes.”

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Slaves to Fashion
Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops
Robert J. S. Ross
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"A brilliant and beautiful book, the mature work of a lifetime, must reading for students of the globalization debate."
---Tom Hayden

"Slaves to Fashion is a remarkable achievement, several books in one: a gripping history of sweatshops, explaining their decline, fall, and return; a study of how the media portray them; an analysis of the fortunes of the current anti-sweatshop movement; an anatomy of the global traffic in apparel, in particular the South-South competition that sends wages and working conditions plummeting toward the bottom; and not least, a passionate declaration of faith that humanity can find a way to get its work done without sweatshops. This is engaged sociology at its most stimulating."
---Todd Gitlin

". . . unflinchingly portrays the reemergence of the sweatshop in our dog-eat-dog economy."
---Los Angeles Times


Just as Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed uncovered the plight of the working poor in America, Robert J. S. Ross's Slaves to Fashion exposes the dark side of the apparel industry and its exploited workers at home and abroad. It's both a lesson in American business history and a warning about one of the most important issues facing the global capital economy-the reappearance of the sweatshop.

Vividly detailing the decline and tragic rebirth of sweatshop conditions in the American apparel industry of the twentieth century, Ross explains the new sweatshops as a product of unregulated global capitalism and associated deregulation, union erosion, and exploitation of undocumented workers. Using historical material and economic and social data, the author shows that after a brief thirty-five years of fair practices, the U.S. apparel business has once again sunk to shameful abuse and exploitation.

Refreshingly jargon-free but documented in depth, Slaves to Fashion is the only work to estimate the size of the sweatshop problem and to systematically show its impact on apparel workers' wages. It is also unique in its analysis of the budgets and personnel used in enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Anyone who is concerned about this urgent social and economic topic and wants to go beyond the headlines should read this important and timely contribution to the rising debate on low-wage factory labor.
Robert J.S. Ross is Professor of Sociology, Clark University. He is an expert in the area of sweatshops and globalization. He is an activist academic who travels and lectures extensively and has published numerous related articles.


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Slayers and Their Vampires
A Cultural History of Killing the Dead
Bruce A. McClelland
University of Michigan Press, 2010
The first book to explore the origins of the vampire slayer

“A fascinating comparison of the original vampire myths to their later literary transformations.”
—Adam Morton, author of On Evil

“From the Balkan Mountains to Beverly Hills, Bruce has mapped the vampire’s migration. There’s no better guide for the trek.”
—Jan L. Perkowski, Professor, Slavic Department, University of Virginia, and author of Vampires of the Slavs and The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism

“The vampire slayer is our protector, our hero, our Buffy. But how much do we really know about him—or her? Very little, it turns out, and Bruce McClelland shows us why: because the vampire slayer is an unsettling figure, almost as disturbing as the evil she is set to destroy. Prepare to be frightened . . . and enlightened.”
—Corey Robin, author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea

“What is unique about this book is that it is the first of its kind to focus on the vampire hunter, rather than the vampire. As such, it makes a significant contribution to the field. This book will appeal to scholars and researchers of folklore, as well as anyone interested in the literature and popular culture of the vampire.”
—Elizabeth Miller, author of Dracula and A Dracula Handbook

“Shades of Van Helsing! Vampirologist extraordinaire Bruce McClelland has managed that rarest of feats: developing a radically new and thoroughly enlightening perspective on a topic of eternal fascination. Ranging from the icons of popular culture to previously overlooked details of Balkan and Slavic history and folk practice, he has rethought the borders of life and death, good and evil, saint and sinner, vampires and their slayers. Excellent scholarship, and a story that never flags.”
—Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of History of Religions, University of Chicago, and author of Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship,Authority: Construction and Corrosion, and Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice
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SLIFE
What Every Teacher Needs to Know
Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2019
SLIFE: What Every Teacher Needs to Know helps readers deepen their understanding of Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE). Because of their limited, greatly interrupted, or sometimes nonexistent participation in formal education, SLIFE face challenges in the classroom that go beyond language and content. Often SLIFE need to develop basic literacy skills and foundational subject-area knowledge, as well as to learn how to engage in the discourse and practices of formal educational settings. So what can teachers do to help these students succeed and to recognize and honor their knowledge, skills, and cultural capital? SLIFE: What Every Teacher Needs to Know centers around four guidelines for teaching SLIFE: question assumptions, foster two-way communication, explicitly teach school tasks and academic ways of thinking, and promote project-based learning. Discussion of the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP), is also included.
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Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Global Economy
Zoltan J. Acs and Bernard Yeung, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Entrepreneurship and globalization are two much-examined forces as we enter the new millennium--yet very little has been published on the intersection of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the global economy. To close the gap, this volume delves into the intricate roles and consequences of such businesses on both global and domestic economies.
The first part of the volume provides an overview of the phenomenon of globalization, arguing that entrepreneurial discovery and technological change lead to globalization, which in turn leads to further opportunity for entrepreneurial discovery--no less for SMEs than for multinational corporations. In part two, the essays examine the role of SMEs in the global economy and why they are thriving. Part three reviews the roles of SMEs and innovators and examines their roles in direct foreign investment. Part four explores the role of technological diversity and knowledge spillovers as a way to explain the superior innovative performance of SMEs. Part five looks at the role of SMEs in technology transfer. Finally, part six examines the theoretical and policy implications of the international activities of SMEs, suggesting that policies should aim to reduce the costs in international expansion for SMEs.
This volume will provide the foundation for further study in SMEs and globalization. It will appeal to scholars and students in both international business and economics.
Zoltan J. Acs is Professor of Economics and Finance, University of Baltimore. Bernard Yin Yeung is Professor of International Business, University of Michigan.
[more]

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Small Change
Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform
Raymond J. La Raja
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Reformers lament that, with every effort to regulate the sources of campaign funding, candidates creatively circumvent the new legislation. But in fact, political fundraisers don't need to look for loopholes because, as Raymond J. La Raja proves, legislators intentionally design regulations to gain advantage over their partisan rivals.

La Raja traces the history of the U.S. campaign finance system from the late nineteenth century through the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002. Then, using the 2004 presidential election as a case study, he compares the ways in which Democrats and Republicans adapted their national fund-raising and campaigning strategies to satisfy BCRA regulations. Drawing upon this wealth of historical and recent evidence, he concludes with recommendations for reforming campaign finance in ways that promote fair competition among candidates and guarantee their accountability to voters.

Small Change offers an engaging account of campaign finance reforms' contradictory history; it is a must-read for anyone concerned about influence of money on democratic elections.

[more]

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Small Well Lane
A Contemporary Chinese Play and Oral History
Li Longyun
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Li Longyun's five-act play, Small Well Lane (Xiaojing hutong), is a spoken drama published in Beijing in 1981. With a cast of nearly thirty characters of different social roles and individual persona, the play provides a vivid sense of how a group of working class Beijing residents living in a courtyard compound in a back alley, or hutong, named "Small Well Lane" experienced China's revolution from 1949 to 1980. It beautifully records the art of talking and living among Beijing back alley folk and provides a vivid contrast to the concerns and lives of China's elites.
This authoritative translation by Hong Jiang and Timothy Cheek is accompanied by notes and annotations to help readers not familiar with China's modern history. A special appendix and ten photographs bring to life the culture of Beijing's famous back alleys.
This edition of Small Well Lane provides readers, and especially students of modern Chinese history, politics, and literature, with a compelling story of the human experience of Mao's revolution in China. It will be of interest to students of modern China and specialists in Chinese history and literature as well as to the general reader.
Li Longyun is a professional playwright working at the Beijing People's Art Theater. Hong Jiang is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, Colorado College. Timothy Cheek is Associate Professor of History, Colorado College.
[more]

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Smartland Korea
Mobile Communication, Culture, and Society
Dal Yong Jin
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The dramatic advancement of cellphone technology has fundamentally changed our daily lives. Smartphones and their applications have created new capital for information and communication technology corporations and changed the way people communicate. Because of an interesting awareness of the significance for digital economy and people’s daily culture, many countries, from the U.S. to China, have massively invested in the smartphone industries since the early 21st century. Among them, South Korea has become one of the centers for technology development and digital culture, although the country was once lagging behind in the penetration of the phones and their apps. Yet within the last few years, the country has taken a big step toward their goal of becoming a ‘mobile game wonderland’ by appropriating smartphones and it now exists as a curious test-bed for the future of smartphone technology. Smartland Korea, as the first attempt to comprehensively analyze mobile communication in the context of Korean smartphones, looks into a largely neglected focus of inquiry, a localized mobile landscape, with particular reference to young Koreans’ engagement with their devices and applications. Dal Yong Jin focuses not only on the celebratory achievement of technological advancement, but also the significance of social milieu in the development of the smartphones. He situates the emergence of smartphones within the growth of mobile technologies and overall telecommunications industries embedded in Korea’s information and communication technologies. The book examines the technology’s innovation and the evolution, the digital economy through the lens of political economy, and the youth culture embedded in the Korean smartphone context.

[more]

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The Smell of Books
A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature
Hans J. Rindisbacher
University of Michigan Press, 1993
The Smell of Books investigates the ways in which the olfactory sense has manifested itself in Italian, German, French, Russian, and English literature of the past 150 years. Against a broad interdiscriplinary backdrop that includes linguistics, psychology, aesthetics, and sociology, Hans J. Rindisbacher takes a new approach to literary history – one centered on the sense of smell.
 
Rindisbacher examines the works of the German Expressionists and of Baudelaire, Huxley, Rimbaud, Wilde, and Turgenev, as well as Holocaust memoirs and contemporary German books such as Patrick Suskind’s Das Parfum and Christa Wolf’s Storfall. He demonstrates that the sense of smell, which has heretofore occupied a position at the bottom of the sensory hierarchy, plays a consequential role in romantic, modern, and contemporary European and Russian literature.
 
[more]

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Snarl
In Defense of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks
Ruth A. Miller
University of Michigan Press, 2014

Ruth A. Miller excavates a centuries-old history of nonhuman and nonbiological constitutional engagement and outlines a robust mechanical democracy that challenges existing theories of liberal and human political participation. Drawing on an eclectic set of legal, political, and automotive texts from France, Turkey, and the United States, she proposes a radical mechanical re-articulation of three of the most basic principles of democracy: vitality, mobility, and liberty.

Rather than defending a grand theory of materialist or posthumanist politics, or addressing abstract concepts or “things” writ large, Miller invites readers into a self-contained history of constitutionalism situated in a focused discussion of automobile traffic congestion in Paris, Istanbul, and Boston. Within the mechanical public sphere created by automotive space, Snarl finds a model of democratic politics that transforms our most fundamental assumptions about the nature, and constitutional potential, of life, movement, and freedom.

[more]

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The Snobs of England and Punch's Prize Novelists
William Makepeace Thackeray
University of Michigan Press, 2005

This volume of The Snobs of England and Punch's Prize Novelists is an addition to The Thackeray Edition collection, the first full-scale scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's works to appear in over seventy years, and the only one ever to be based on an examination of manuscripts and relevant printed texts. It is also a concrete attempt to put into practice a theory of scholarly editing that gives new insight into Thackeray's own compositional process. In The Snobs of England, a series of amusing satirical sketches, Thackeray provides a panoramic awareness of the many varieties of human folly, identifying snobbery not as a social attitude but as the unworthy admiration of foolish things. Punch's Prize Novelists presents a series of illustrated burlesque parodies of Thackeray's contemporary writers, including Edward Bulwer, Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs. Catherine Gore, G.P.R. James, Charles Lever, and James Fenimore Cooper. The works are edited here from a comparative study of all relevant documents: from the first published appearances to the last editions touched by the author.

[more]

front cover of The Snodgrass Site of the Powers Phase of Southeast Missouri
The Snodgrass Site of the Powers Phase of Southeast Missouri
James E. Price and James B. Griffin
University of Michigan Press, 1979
In this volume, the authors report on the complete excavation of the Snodgrass site, a prehistoric Mississippian village in southeast Missouri. More than 30 structures were completely excavated over seven years of fieldwork. Price and Griffin present descriptions and analyses of the structures, artifacts (primarily lithics and ceramics), and burials found at the site. Their work provides a look at the social complexity and patterned lifeways that existed within a prehistoric village population.
[more]

front cover of The Snyders Mounds and Five Other Mound Groups in Calhoun County, Illinois
The Snyders Mounds and Five Other Mound Groups in Calhoun County, Illinois
David P. Braun, James B. Griffin and Paul F. Titterington
University of Michigan Press, 1982
In the 1940s, Paul F. Titterington, a doctor and avocational archaeologist, excavated several prehistoric burial mounds in Calhoun County, Illinois. He did not publish the results of his research, but he did donate his notebooks, photographs, and artifact collection to the University of Michigan in 1955. In this report, David Braun and James Griffin present Titterington’s research.
[more]

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So Ask
Essays, Conversations, and Interviews
Philip Levine
University of Michigan Press, 2002
An engaging and intimate collection by an American original
[more]

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Soapy
A Biography of G. Mennen Williams
Thomas J. Noer
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"This is an important book about an important public official, G. Mennen 'Soapy' Williams---an unabashed liberal, a true humanitarian, and a great patriot."
---George McGovern

"Soapy Williams had a deep talent not only to compel but on occasion to repel."
---John Kenneth Galbraith

"Thomas Noer has written a model biography of a fascinating political figure. He brings Williams to life with all his contradictions, old-fashioned qualities, and admirable idealism."
---Robert Divine, George W. Littlefield Professor Emeritus in American History, University of Texas

"G. Mennen 'Soapy' Williams was not only a giant in the 20th century history of the Michigan Democratic Party, the history of the state of Michigan and our nation-he was a giant ahead of his time. Throughout his long and extremely distinguished career as Governor of Michigan, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, Soapy maintained an unwavering commitment to equality, justice and civil rights for all people."
---Senator Carl Levin

In this first complete biography of G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams, author Thomas Noer brings to life the story of one of the most controversial and colorful politicians in twentieth-century American politics and a giant in the Michigan Democratic Party.

In 1948, winning a stunning upset, Williams became Michigan's second Democratic governor since the Civil War and was reelected five times. He served under Kennedy and Johnson as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, briefly held the post of U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines, and was a member of the Michigan Supreme Court from 1970 to 1986, serving as Chief Justice in his last term.

Sporting his instantly recognizable trademark green and white polka-dot bow tie, Williams was a flamboyant character. He was also known for his energetic campaign style: he could say "hello" in seventeen languages, would shake hands with as many as five thousand factory workers a day, and made seemingly endless diplomatic trips to Africa. All of this captured the attention of the media and the public and made Williams into a celebrity.

Beneath his showy public persona, however, Williams also made important contributions to American diplomatic and political history. He built an unrivaled political machine in Michigan, bringing organized labor, African Americans, and ethnic groups into a new coalition; influenced the shift in American policy toward support for African independence; and wrote landmark decisions as a jurist on the Michigan Supreme Court.

The fascinating story of a complex and complicated man, Soapy will introduce one of the great American political figures of the twentieth century to a new generation of readers.
[more]

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The Social Benefits of Education
Jere R. Behrman and Nevzer Stacey, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1997
For decades, the primary argument in justifying education has been based on its direct economic effects. Yet education also provides "social benefits" for individuals and society at large, including a better way of taking care of ourselves, and consequently creating a better society to live in. Though it is difficult to quantify these social benefits, a more systematic analysis would improve our understanding of the full effects of education and provide a basis for considering related policies. The Office of Research of the United States Department of Education commissioned a series of papers on measuring these effects of education.
Those papers, revised and updated, are collected here. Kenneth J. Arrow provides perspective on education and preference formation, and Jere R. Behrman considers general conceptual and measurement issues in assessing the social benefits of education and policies related to education. These issues are taken up by experts in four fields--health, parenting, the environment, and crime. Themes addressed include measurement issues regarding what we mean by education and its benefits; basic analytical issues in assessing the impact of education on these social benefits using behavioral data; and whether the social benefits of education justify public policy interventions.
Jere R. Behrman is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania. Nevzer G. Stacey is Senior Research Analyst, Office of Educational Research, U.S. Department of Education.
[more]

front cover of Social Dimensions of U.S. Trade Policies
Social Dimensions of U.S. Trade Policies
Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The contributors to this volume include numerous members of the trade policy community who analyze and discuss the salient social dimensions of U.S. trade policies. These issues include the effects of trade on wage inequality; trade and immigration policy; U.S. trade adjustment assistance policies; the effects of NAFTA on environmental quality; the role of labor standards in U.S. trade policies; the economics of labor standards and the GATT; issues of child labor; and the role of interest groups in the design and implementation of U.S. trade policies.
Chapter authors are Kyle Bagwell, Claude Barfield, George J. Borjas, Drusilla K. Brown, Alan V. Deardorff, Nancy Dunne, Gary S. Fields, John Kirton, Mike Jendrzejczyk, Phyllis Shearer Jones, Edward E. Leamer, Robert Naiman, Gregory K. Schoepfle, Robert W. Staiger, and Robert M. Stern.
Commenters are Steve Beckman, Jagdish Bhagwati, Alan V. Deardorff, Avinash Dixit, Pharis Harvey, David van Hoogstraten, John H. Jackson, Lawrence Mishel, Jack Otero, J. David Richardson, Dani Rodrik, Mark Silbergeld, and T. N. Srinivasan.
Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern are Professors of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.
[more]

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Social Exchange and Interaction
Edited by Edwin N. Wilmsen
University of Michigan Press, 1972
Contributors in this volume are concerned with the role of exchange in maintaining social systems as diverse as aboriginal Australia, 1960s Madagascar, and prehistoric Mesopotamia. Contributions by Aram A. Yengoyan, George C. Frison, Richard I. Ford, Stuart Struever, Gail L. Houart, Peter Benedict, Henry T. Wright, Conrad P. Kottak, and Kent V. Flannery.
[more]

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The Social Life of Criticism
Gender, Critical Writing, and the Politics of Belonging
Kimberly J. Stern
University of Michigan Press, 2016
The Social Life of Criticism explores the cultural representation of the female critic in Victorian Britain, focusing especially on how women writers imagined themselves—in literary essays, periodical reviews, and even works of fiction—as participants in complex networks of literary exchange. Kimberly Stern proposes that in response to the “male collectivity” prominently featured in critical writings, female critics adopted a social and sociological understanding of the profession, often reimagining the professional networks and communities they were so eager to join.

This engaging study begins by looking at the eighteenth century, when critical writing started to assume the institutional and generic structures we associate with it today, and examines a series of case studies that illuminate how women writers engaged with the forms of intellectual sociability that defined nineteenth-century criticism—including critical dialogue, the club, the salon, and the publishing firm. In doing so, it clarifies the fascinating rhetorical and political debates surrounding the figure of the female critic and charts how women writers worked both within and against professional communities. Ultimately, Stern contends that gender was a formative influence on critical practice from the very beginning, presenting the history of criticism as a history of gender politics.

While firmly grounded in literary studies, The Social Life of Criticism combines an attention to historical context with a deep investment in feminist scholarship, social theory, and print culture. The book promises to be of interest not only to professional academics and graduate students in nineteenth-century literature but also to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including literature, intellectual history, cultural studies, gender theory, and sociology.
 

[more]

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Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse
Uses and Meanings of the Past
Bernd Steinbock
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Prompted by the abundant historical allusions in Athenian political and diplomatic discourse, Bernd Steinbock analyzes the uses and meanings of the past in fourth-century Athens, using Thebes’ role in Athenian memory as a case study. This examination is based upon the premise that Athenian social memory, that is, the shared and often idealized and distorted image of the past, should not be viewed as an unreliable counterpart of history but as an invaluable key to the Athenians’ mentality. Against the tendency to view the orators’ references to the past as empty rhetorical phrases or propagandistic cover-ups for Realpolitik, it argues that the past constituted important political capital in its own right. Drawing upon theories of social memory, it contextualizes the orators’ historical allusions within the complex net of remembrances and beliefs held by the audience and thus tries to gauge their ideological and emotive power. 
 
Integrating literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence with recent scholarship on memory, identity, rhetoric, and international relations, Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Past enhances our understanding of both the function of memory in Athenian public discourse and the history of Athenian-Theban relations. It should be of interest not only to students of Greek history and oratory but to everybody interested in memory studies, Athenian democracy, and political decision making.
[more]

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Social Organization in South China, 1911–1949
The Case of Kuan Lineage in K’ai-p’ing County
Yuen-fong Woon
University of Michigan Press, 1984
Bridging the collapse of the Confucian state and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the period 1911–49 is particularly fascinating to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. Unfortunately, it is also a very confusing period, full of shifts and changes in economic, social, and political organizations. The social implications of these changes, and the relationships between officials on the subdistrict level, the unofficial leaders, and the bulk of the peasantry remain inadequately known. South China, which nurtured the Communist Party in its formative years, is a particularly interesting case. In this study I use the Kuan lineage of K’ai-p’ing as a case study to show the effects of demographic, economic, administrative, and educational changes after the Treaty of Nanking (1842) on patrilineal kinship as a principle of social organization in South China. [vii]
[more]

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The Social Politics of Medieval Diplomacy
Anglo-German Relations (1066-1307)
Joseph P. Huffman
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and intellectual boundaries have heavily influenced our views of medieval Germany. Historians have looked back to the Middle Ages for the origins of modern European political crises. They concluded that while England and France built nation-states during the medieval era, Germany--lacking a unified nation-state--remained uniquely backward and undeveloped.
Employing a comparative social history, Huffman reassesses traditional national historiographies of medieval diplomacy and political life. Germany is integrated into Anglo-French notions of western Europe and shown to be both an integral player in western European political history as well as a political community that was as fully developed as those of medieval England or France.
The Social Politics of Medieval Diplomacy offers a study of the social dynamics of relations between political communities. In particular, the Anglo-French political communities do not appear as state and constitution builders, while the German political community is not as a state and constitution destroyer. The book concludes by encouraging medievalists to integrate the German kingdom into their intellectual constructs of medieval Europe.
This book is an essential history of medieval Germany. It bridges the gaps between Anglo-French and German scholarship and political and social history. Joseph Huffman makes available German-language scholarship. Both English and German history is integrated in an accessible and interesting way. The historiographical implications of this study will be far-reaching.
Joseph P. Huffman is Associate Professor of History and Political Science, Messiah College.
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Social Science and Policy-Making
A Search for Relevance in the Twentieth Century
David L. Featherman and Maris A. Vinovskis, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2001
This collection of essays examines how the social sciences in America were developed as a means of social reform and later, especially after World War II, as a tool in federal policymaking and policy analysis. It also uses arenas of policymaking, such as early childhood education and welfare and its reform, as case studies in which social research was used, in policy decisions or in setting and evaluating policy goals. The book is written to aid students of public policy to appreciate the complex relationship of information--principally, of social science research--to policymaking at the federal level.
David L. Featherman is Professor of Sociology and Psychology, Director and Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Maris A. Vinovskis is Bentley Professor of History, Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research, Faculty member, School of Public Policy, University of Michigan.
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Social Science Knowledge and Economic Development
An Institutional Design Perspective
Vernon W. Ruttan
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Ruttan advances a model of institutional change, which creates an environment where resource and cultural endowments and technical change can take place. The disequilibria resulting from such changes create opportunities for the design of more efficient institutional arrangements. The design perspective employed in the book stands in sharp contrast to organic or evolutionary perspectives.
With its emphasis on interdisciplinarity, Social Science Knowledge and Economics Developmentis important reading for social scientists, development economists, and in the development studies classroom.
Vernon W. Ruttan is Regents Professor Emeritus in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota.
[more]

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Social Singing among the Mapuche
Mischa Titiev
University of Michigan Press, 1949
In this slim volume, Mischa Titiev presents the text and translation of a series of Mapuche songs he recorded on a trip to Chile in 1948.
[more]

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Socialism after Hayek
Theodore A. Burczak
University of Michigan Press, 2009
Socialism after Hayek recasts and reinvigorates the socialist quest for class justice by rendering it compatible with Hayek's social and economic theories. Theodore A. Burczak puts forth a conception of socialism from a postmodern perspective, drawing from the apparently opposing ideas of Marx and Hayek (the latter of whom achieved worldwide recognition in the twentieth century as a champion of the free market and fierce opponent of government interference in markets). Burczak sketches an institutional structure that would promote a democratic socialist notion of distributive justice and his own interpretation of Marx's notion of freely associated labor, while avoiding Hayek's criticisms of centrally planned socialism.

Burczak's version of market socialism is one in which privately owned firms are run democratically by workers, governments engage in ongoing redistribution of wealth to support human development, and markets are otherwise unregulated. Burczak poses this model of "free market socialism" against other models of socialism, especially those developed by John Roemer, Michael Albert, and Robin Hahnel.

"Burczakian socialism = (Hayek + Nussbaum + Sen + Ackerman + Resnick and Wolff) = Ellerman = legal-economic democracy. Brilliant! Burczak takes Hayek, his critics, and other social theorists and produces the foundations of a legal-economic order in which the concerns of most current thinkers are provided for. It is a deep, sustained, and brilliant achievement."
—Warren J. Samuels, Professor Emeritus, Economics Department, Michigan State University; former President of the History of Economics Society and the Association for Social Economics; coeditor of the Journal of Income Distribution; and author of over 40 books

"Theodore A. Burczak's Socialism after Hayek is a thoroughly researched and thoughtful examination not only of the ideological debate that framed the twentieth century, but of Hayek's intellectual framework. Burczak hopes for an economic framework that is both humanistic in its approach and humanitarian in its concern while being grounded in good reasons. The book should be on the reading list of every comparative political economist and in particular anyone who wants to take Hayek seriously, including those who would like to push Hayek's classical liberal politics toward the left in the twenty-first century. Burczak has made an outstanding contribution to the fields of political and economic thought and to Hayek studies in particular."
—Peter J. Boettke, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Economics, George Mason University, Fairfax

"An advance well beyond the great 'socialist calculation debate.' Socialism after Hayek is both novel and challenging to contemporary Hayekian scholars. Burczak is the only scholar working in the post-Marxist tradition that thoroughly understands and appreciates the Hayekian critique of socialism. He is on his way to answering many of our long-held objections."
—Dave Prychitko, Department of Economics, Northern Michigan University

"One does not have to agree with all of Burczak's arguments to accept that he has developed a bold, creative and challenging response to the powerful Hayekian critique of socialism. Burczak wisely rejects the agoraphobia—literally the fear of markets—of many socialists, and focuses instead on the socialist goal of the abolition of exploitation. If this important book is read by both socialists and Hayekians, then there is a chance that debates on the viability of socialism may avoid some past pitfalls."
—Geoffrey M. Hodgson, University of Hertfordshire, UK

"Provocative and expansive. An excellent book that deals in depth with the relevant literature, incorporating it into a new analysis of the question of socialism. . . . The scholarship is superior: Burczak integrates the works of Hayek and Marx to develop a new theory of justice and to provide a new way to think through the problems of a socialist economy."
—Stephen Cullenberg, Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside

"A brilliant, fair-minded approach to Marx, Hayek, Sen, and Nussbaum yields a needed socialist vision for the twenty-first century."
—Stephen Resnick, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts

Theodore A. Burczak is Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University.
[more]

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Socialist Modern
East German Everyday Culture and Politics
Katherine Pence & Paul Betts, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2008

The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over. Where most of the literature over the past two decades has been driven by the desire to uncover the relationship between power and resistance, complicity and consent, more recent scholarship tends to concentrate on the everyday history of East German citizens.

This volume builds on the latest literature by exploring the development and experience of life in East Germany, with a particular view toward addressing the question: What did modernity mean for the East German state and society? As such, the collection moves beyond the conceptual divide between state-level politics and everyday life to sharply focus on the specific contours of the GDR's unique experiment in Cold War socialism. What unites all the essays is the question of how the very tensions around "socialist modernity" shaped the views, memories, and actions of East Germans over four decades.

"An impressive volume drawing together rich, diverse essays by some of the most interesting, well-known, and experienced scholars on the GDR in the field, on both sides of the Atlantic."
---Dr. Jan Palmowski, Senior Lecturer in European Studies at King's College London, and Review Editor for German History

"Delving into many sides of the GDR modern, Pence and Betts present both new empirical evidence and offer insightful theoretical perspectives. The idea of the 'Socialist Modern' provides an excellent conceptual framework; the focus on culture fills a hole in the literature, the introduction is theoretically sophisticated and well-grounded in the historiography, and the span and heterogeneity of the articles are impressive."
---Donna Harsch, Associate Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon University

Katherine Pence is Assistant Professor of History, Baruch College, City University of New York.

Paul Betts is Reader in Modern German History, University of Sussex, Brighton, England.

Contributors
Daphne Berdahl
Paul Betts
Alon Confino
Greg Eghigian
Dagmar Herzog
Young-Sun Hong
Thomas Lindenberger
Alf Lüdtke
Ina Merkel
Katherine Pence
Judd Stitziel
Dorothee Wierling

[more]

front cover of Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930
Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930
Geoff Eley, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930 draws together important new work on the Kaiserreich--the period between Bismarck's unification of Germany and the First World War.
Work on the Kaiserreich built up impressive momentum during the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of inspiring but divisive controversies called into question the ways in which German historical development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mainly understood. These discussions focused on issues of continuity between Bismarck and Hitler and the peculiar strength of authoritarianism in German political culture, raising important questions about the deep origins of Nazism and about Germany's alleged differences from the West.
The collection purposefully brings certain issues and approaches into the foreground. These include the value of taking gender seriously as a priority of historical work; the emergence of social policy and welfare during the early twentieth century; religious belief and affiliation as a neglected dimension in modern German history; the tremendous importance of the First World War as a climacteric; and the exciting potentials of cultural studies and the new cultural history.
A varied group, the contributors embrace different kinds of history and certainly do not subscribe to a common line. Some essays suggest alternative periodizations and focus on the early twentieth century decades rather than the integral unity of the Kaiserreich as such. Together, they take stock of the field, critically synthesizing existing knowledge and laying down agendas for the future.
Geoff Eley is Professor of History, University of Michigan.
[more]

front cover of Sociopolitical Aspects of Canal Irrigation in the Valley of Oaxaca
Sociopolitical Aspects of Canal Irrigation in the Valley of Oaxaca
Susan H. Lees
University of Michigan Press, 1973
In order to study canal irrigation in the Valley of Oaxaca, archaeologist Susan H. Lees visited more than 20 villages in the region. She interviewed residents and photographed local water systems. In this volume, Lees analyzes the relationship between water control and local and state government; compares Oaxacan irrigation with that in other regions; and assesses the role of organized labor in the establishment and maintenance of an irrigation system.
[more]

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Socrates of Constantinople
Historian of Church and State
Theresa Urbainczyk
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The fourth century c.e. saw the death of the ancient world and the birth of the medieval. Pagan temples crumbled through disuse, while Christian churches sprang up around the fledgling Holy Roman Empire. The emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity changed history: pagans blamed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire on Christianity, but Christians explained events differently.
The church history written by Socrates of Constantinople is one of the most important sources, Eastern or Western, pagan or Christian, for these complex centuries. Socrates of Constantinople: Historian of Church and State is the first detailed study of Socrates' history--it describes the historical situation in which he wrote his work, and it pulls together all the personal information available about the author. The volume then examines Socrates' own work: how it was composed, which sources were used and how, and it looks at the relationship between Socrates' work and other church histories. It goes on to consider Socrates' attitudes towards bishops, emperors, and their enemies.
Socrates is sometimes dismissed by modern scholars for being a poor ecclesiastical historiographer. However, Theresa Urbainczyk carefully demonstrates Socrates' theory of causation, which affected the way he wrote his history, and she argues that he introduced secular material deliberately. In his view arguments and division in the church caused trouble in the state. In other words, when church leaders quibbled over theology, they endangered the state. It was therefore their duty, for the sake of church and state, to unite--under the emperor. This study not only calls on scholars to reexamine Socrates of Constantinople but makes the wider arguments that the ancients were far less concerned with genre than are modern scholars, and that ecclesiastical history is a continuation of, not a deviation from, political history.
Socrates of Constantinople: Historian of Church and State will be of interest to students and scholars interested in late Roman and early Christian history, theology, and historiography. Anyone studying late antiquity will find an examination of Socrates' attitudes essential.
Theresa Urbainczyk is College Lecturer in the Department of Classics, University College, Dublin.
[more]

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Soda Goes Pop
Pepsi-Cola Advertising and Popular Music
Joanna K. Love
University of Michigan Press, 2019
From its 1939 “Nickel, Nickel” jingle to pathbreaking collaborations with Michael Jackson and Madonna to its pair of X Factor commercials in 2011 and 2012, Pepsi-Cola has played a leading role in drawing the American pop music industry into a synergetic relationship with advertising. This idea has been copied successfully by countless other brands over the years, and such commercial collaboration is commonplace today—but how did we get here? How and why have pop music aesthetics been co-opted to benefit corporate branding? What effect have Pepsi’s music marketing practices in particular had on other brands, the advertising industry, and popular music itself?

Soda Goes Pop investigates these and other vital questions around the evolving relationships between popular music and corporate advertising. Joanna K. Love joins musical analysis, historical research, and cultural theory to trace parallel shifts in these industries over eight decades. In addition to scholarly and industry resources, she draws on first-hand accounts, pop culture magazines, trade press journals, and other archival materials. Pepsi’s longevity as an influential American brand, its legendary commercials, and its pioneering, relentless pursuit of alliances with American musical stars makes the brand a particularly instructive point of focus. Several of the company’s most famous ad campaigns are prime examples of the practice of redaction, whereby marketers select, censor, and restructure musical texts to fit commercial contexts in ways that revise their aesthetic meanings and serve corporate aims. Ultimately, Love demonstrates how Pepsi’s marketing has historically appropriated and altered images of pop icons and the meanings of hit songs, and how these commercials shaped relationships between the American music business, the advertising industry, and corporate brands.

Soda Goes Pop is a rich resource for scholars and students of American studies, popular culture, advertising, broadcast media, and musicology. It is also an accessible and informative book for the general reader, as Love’s musical and theoretical analyses are clearly presented for non-specialist audiences and readers with varying degrees of musical knowledge.
 
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Sojiji
Discipline, Compassion, and Enlightenment at a Japanese Zen Temple
Joshua A. Irizarry
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Sōjiji is one of the two head temples of Sōtō Zen, the largest sect of Japanese Buddhism. The temple is steeped in centuries of culture and tradition, but it is very much rooted in the present and future, performing functions and catering to needs that reflect the changing demographic, social, and religious landscapes of contemporary Japan.

Based on more than fifteen years of fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, Sōjiji: Discipline, Compassion, and Enlightenment at a Japanese Zen Temple immerses the reader in the lives and experiences of the different groups that comprise Sōjiji's contemporary religious community. Through clear and accessible prose, ethnographically-grounded analysis, and emotionally compelling stories, the reader will explore the rich pastiche of daily life and ritual activity at a major Japanese Zen temple in institutional, historical, and social context through the lived practices of its community of clergy, practitioners, parishioners, and visitors.
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Soknopaiou Nesos
The University of Michigan Excavations at Dimê in 1931-32
Edited by Arthur E.R. Boak
University of Michigan Press, 1935
A change in archaeological venue from prior excavations at Karanis to nearby Soknopaiou Nesos resulted in useful comparable data. Evidence has proven that both sites flourished in the same period, from the first century BCE to the third century CE.
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The Sola Valley and the Monte Albán State
A Study of Zapotec Imperial Expansion
Andew K. Balkansky
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Balkansky’s full-coverage survey of the Sola Valley, 65 km southwest of Oaxaca City, documents 120 sites. By combining his data with that of 13 other regions of Oaxaca, he produces a model for Zapotec state expansion that integrates colonization, diplomacy, and military conquest.
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Soldiers, Cities, and Civilians in Roman Syria
Nigel Pollard
University of Michigan Press, 2000
When one mentions "empire," one place probably comes to mind: Rome. The Romans conquered an empire that covered almost the complete extent of their known world. With a territory that large, there was, of course, a huge cultural diversity between the different corners of the empire. How could the central authority in Rome bring together all the different cultures, religions and customs under one administrative umbrella? Soldiers, Cities and Civilians in Roman Syria explores some of the interactions between the imperial authority and the subjected peoples in the territory of Syria. It looks at how the imperial power controlled its subjects, how the agents of the imperial power (administrators, soldiers, etc.) interacted with those subjects, and what impact the imperial power had on the culture of ruled territories. The Roman empire had few civilian administrators, so soldiers were the representatives of imperial government to be encountered by many provincial civilians. Soldiers, Cities and Civilians in Roman Syria employs the evidence of Roman texts and documents and modern archaeological excavation as well as "alternative" sources, such as the literature of the subject peoples and informal texts such as graffiti, to examine the relationship between soldiers and civilians in the important frontier province of Syria.
Nigel Pollard is currently a Research Assistant at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford.
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Solidarity's Secret
The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland
Shana Penn
University of Michigan Press, 2006
"This important book explores one of the most pivotal periods in Polish history and deals with a topic nearly everyone else overlooked. Shana Penn's study begins with a simple question I wish I had thought more about myself: once the leadership of Solidarity had been arrested during the 1981 military coup, who kept the movement alive over the following months and years? The answer will surprise you, as Penn delves into the lives of seven Polish women activists who rose to the call, set about saving an entire political movement, and in time turned themselves into some of the most powerful women in Poland today."
---Lech Walesa, former President of Poland and winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize


Solidarity's Secret is the first book to record the crucial yet little-known role women played in the rise of an independent press in Poland and in the fall of that country's communist government.

Shana Penn pieces together a decade of interviews with the women behind the Polish pro-democracy movement-women whose massive contributions were obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts.

Penn reveals the story of how these brave women ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, Tygodnik Mazowsze, while prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years. The same women then went on to play influential roles in post-communist Poland.

Solidarity's Secret gives us a richly detailed story-within-a-story-unheard of not only in the West, but until recently even within Poland itself-from one of the most important eras in modern history.
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Solutions Manual to Elements of Econometrics
Jan Kmenta
University of Michigan Press, 1997

The Solutions Manual to Elements of Econometrics, Second Edition provides chapter solutions to the exercises in the college textbook: Elements of Econometrics, Second Edition by Jan Kmenta.

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Someone Shot My Book
Julie Carr
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Approaching the practices of reading and writing from a feminist perspective, Julie Carr asks vital ethical questions about the role of poetry—and of art in general—in a violent culture. She addresses issues such as the art of listening, the body and the avant-garde, gun violence, police brutality, reading and protest, and feminist responses to war in essays that are lucid, inventive, and informed by a life lived with poetry. Essays on poets Lorine Niedecker, Jean Valentine, Anne Carson, Lyn Hejinian, and Lisa Robertson detail some of the political, emotional, and spiritual work of these forerunners. A former dancer, Carr also takes up question of text, dance, performance, and race in an essay on the work of choreographer, writer, and visual artist Ralph Lemon and poet Fred Moten.

Carr’s essays push past familiar boundaries between the personal/confessional and experimental/conceptual strains in American poetry. Pressing philosophical inquiries into the nature of gender, motherhood, fear, the body, and violence up against readings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, she asks us to consider the political and affective work of poetry in a range of contexts. Carr reports on her own practices, examining her concerns for research and narrative against her investment in lyric, as well as her history as a dancer and her work as curator and publisher. Carr’s breadth of inquiry moves well beyond the page, yet remains grounded in languages possibilities.
 
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Someone to Watch Over Me
The Life and Music of Ben Webster
Frank Büchmann-Møller
University of Michigan Press, 2010
For a half century, Ben Webster, one of the "big three" of swing tenors-along with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young-was one of the best-known and most popular saxophonists.

Early in his career, Webster worked with many of the greatest orchestras of the time, including those led by Willie Bryant, Cab Calloway, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Andy Kirk, Bennie Moten, and Teddy Wilson. In 1940 Webster became Duke Ellington's first major tenor soloist, and during the next three years he played on many famous recordings, including "Cotton Tail."

Someone to Watch Over Me tells, for the first time, the complete story of Ben Webster's brilliant and troubled career. For this comprehensive study of Webster, author Frank Büchmann-Møller interviewed more than fifty people in the United States and Europe, and he includes numerous translated excerpts from European periodicals and newspapers, none previously available in English. In addition, the author studies every known Webster recording and film, including many private recordings from Webster's home collection not available to the public.

Exhaustively researched, this is a much needed and long overdue study of the life and music of one of jazz's most important artists.
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Sondheim's Broadway Musicals
Stephen Banfield
University of Michigan Press, 1995
With thirteen Broadway musicals to his credit, Stephen Sondheim's career in the musical theater has outdistanced those of most of his contemporaries. Each of his shows has presented new challenges to audiences, and each has cast fresh perspectives on the nature and potential of the American musical, as well as probing deeply, often painfully, into the nature of our culture.
Sondheim's Broadway Musicals is the first book to take an in-depth look at Sondheim's work. Stephen Banfield examines each of Sondheim's musicals for Broadway, from West Side Story and Gypsy to the 1987 musical Into the Woods, and includes A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, Anyone Can Whistle, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George. Banfield also discusses Sondheim's other work, such as the 1991 show Assassins and his music for the 1990 film Dick Tracy--for which "Sooner or Later" won him an Academy Award for Best Song.
"Banfield seems almost to hear Sondheim's music with Sondheim's ears. This extremely valuable work discusses Sondheim's early training and subsequent career, his general compositional concerns, and his style. The meat of the book is a musical-dramatic analysis of his musicals . . . . For each musical, Banfield places the work and its components in a historical and typological text. He also treats in welcome detail the musical profile or universe of each show: Sondheim's use of generative intervals or interval complexes as source material, motifs that reappear in various guises in various songs, the sound world that defines the musical's emotional mind. The book will be as useful to those who are cool to Sondheim's work as to his fans." --Choice
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A Song for One or Two
Music and the Concept of Art in Early China
Kenneth J. DeWoskin
University of Michigan Press, 1982
This study of theories of music and art in China from the classical period to the Six Dynasties is based on analysis and interpretation of textual and archaeological evidence. Its wide-ranging sources include mythology, aesthetic philosophy, musical lore, and notation systems. The evolution of theories of music and art is considered in the context of cosmological and moral philosophy.
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Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto
Poetry and Identity
David Mura
University of Michigan Press, 2002
As a Sansei or third-generation Japanese American poet, David Mura is one of the generation of multicultural writers who are changing the face of American poetry. Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto explores shifts in and challenges to aesthetic standards that have come about because of a more diverse range of American writers and because of the growing awareness of world literature.
Mura's writings recently have been at the center of various debates concerning race and literary standards. In this book, he argues the need for a more complicated and diverse set of literary standards than the canon has previously allowed, an opening up to the many voices that are "great within us." He contends that, when placed against a gathering awareness of a world literature, particularly in the so-called Third World, the boundaries of the traditional Anglo-American canon and its present-day proponents like Harold Bloom come to be seen as too narrow and parochial, reenacting the "tribal" label that many throw now at the advocates of multiculturalism.
Beyond its theoretical underpinnings, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto charts the wayward course of Mura's own development as a poet. In three interviews, Mura provides readings of his own work and discusses various issues of technique and form.
David Mura is a poet, memoirist, essayist, playwright, writer of fiction, performance artist, and literary critic. He is author of The Colors of Desire, After We Lost Our Way, and Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei.
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The Song of the Hawk
The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins
John Chilton
University of Michigan Press, 1993
The first full-length biography of Coleman Hawkins
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"Songes of Rechelesnesse"
Langland and the Franciscans
Lawrence M. Clopper
University of Michigan Press, 1997
William Langland's Piers Plowman provides a highly charged picture of England near the end of the fourteenth century, a time of political, religious, and moral crises. The period in which Langland wrote was volatile and full of colorful and contentious people: Edward III, Richard II, Chaucer, Wyclif--and Langland. In "Songes of Rechelesnesse," Lawrence M. Clopper presents the voice of this powerful disputant who lived in a period marked by dissent and discontent.
In the late Middle Ages, Franciscan friars had a significant impact on all levels of society.
But because of the apparent discrepancy between the poverty the Franciscans claimed and the life they lived, a large body of antifraternal literature arose, including, supposedly, Piers Plowman. Since the sixteenth century, when it was first put into print, Piers Plowman has been understood to be a proto-Protestant work that revealed the failures of the medieval clergy, but especially of the mendicant orders. In "Songes of Rechelesnesse," Clopper establishes the presence of a Franciscan reformist position in Piers Plowman.
Clopper maintains that the poem articulates a reformist agenda, presenting the internal Franciscan debate, in a bid to return the order to its initial foundation. Clopper believes that Langland is deeply imbued with a Franciscan mentality that reaches deep into the structure of the poem. It manifests itself at the level of the alliterative long line in his exemplarist poetics and is the source of his imagery and politics. In short Clopper identifies Franciscanism as holding the poem together.
"Songes of Rechelesnesse" is a historical, political, and religious history of late fourteenth-century England. It will be of interest to literary scholars, historians of the late Middle Ages, and scholars in religious studies.
Lawrence M. Clopper is Director, Medieval Studies Institute, and Professor of English, Indiana University.
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Song-Poems from Xanadu
J. I. Crump
University of Michigan Press, 1993
If the title Song-Poems from Xanadu seems hauntingly familiar to the reader, it is because there is another book called Songs from Xanadu, written by the same author between 1979 and 1983, primarily as a rigorous attempt to make some sense out of the technical and prosodic questions which these songs raise about themselves. The editor at the Center for Chinese Studies noted somewhat wistfully that Songs from Xanadu would have been a perfect title for the present book. Since the author already used that title up on a somewhat stuffier work, he tried to mollify the editor by choosing a title that sounded as much like the one he preferred as possible. Being largely directed at specialists in Chinese literature, the first book differs greatly from this, its sequel, which is written for those who know next to nothing about its subject. [ix-x]
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Song-Poems from Xanadu
J. I. Crump
University of Michigan Press, 1993
If the title Song-Poems from Xanadu seems hauntingly familiar to the reader, it is because there is another book called Songs from Xanadu, written by the same author between 1979 and 1983, primarily as a rigorous attempt to make some sense out of the technical and prosodic questions which these songs raise about themselves. The editor at the Center for Chinese Studies noted somewhat wistfully that Songs from Xanadu would have been a perfect title for the present book. Since the author already used that title up on a somewhat stuffier work, he tried to mollify the editor by choosing a title that sounded as much like the one he preferred as possible. Being largely directed at specialists in Chinese literature, the first book differs greatly from this, its sequel, which is written for those who know next to nothing about its subject. [ix-x]
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The Songs of Blind Folk
African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness
Terry Rowden
University of Michigan Press, 2009

"Rowden has wedded ethnomusicology and disability studies to offer a fresh approach to the study of African American popular music. The Songs of Blind Folk undermines many of the defining mythologies and tropes of blind musicians, including the perception that they are successful because they compensate for the loss of vision."
---Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University

"Illuminates how the enduring phenomenon of blind African American musicians emerged from brutal conditions, how these musicians were deployed in the burgeoning American iconography of race and 'freakdom,' and how they negotiated this hazardous cultural terrain . . . the book is timely, well-historicized, and rich in insight."
---Kari Winter, University at Buffalo

The Songs of Blind Folk explores the ways that the lives and careers of blind and visually impaired African American musicians and singers have mirrored the changes in America's image of African Americans and the social positioning and possibilities of the entire black community. The book offers a historically grounded consideration of African American performers and their audiences, and the ways that blindness, like blackness, has affected the way the music has been produced and received. Author Terry Rowden considers the controversial nineteenth-century prodigy Blind Tom Bethune; blues singers and songwriters such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, who achieved an unprecedented degree of visibility and acceptance in the 1920s and '30s; spiritual and gospel musicians such as the Blind Boys of Alabama; celebrated jazz and rhythm and blues artists Art Tatum, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Ray Charles; and finally, perhaps the best known of all blind performers, Stevie Wonder.

Terry Rowden is Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Staten Island. He is coeditor of Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.

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Songs of the Michigan Lumberjacks
Earl Clifton Beck
University of Michigan Press, 1941

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Sonorous Worlds
Musical Enchantment in Venezuela
Yana Stainova
University of Michigan Press, 2023
El Sistema is a nationwide, state-funded music education program in Venezuela. Founded in 1975 by economist and musician José Antonio Abreu, the institution has weathered seven jolting changes in government. Hugo Chávez and, after his death, president Nicolás Maduro enthusiastically included the institution into the political agenda of the socialist project and captured the affective power of music for their own aims. Fueled by the oil boom in the 2000s, El Sistema grew over the years to encompass 1,210 orchestras for children and young people in Venezuela, reached almost 1 million people out of the 30 million in the country, and served as a model in more than 35 countries around the world.

Sonorous Worlds is an ethnography of the young Venezuelan musicians who participate in El Sistema, many of whom live in urban barrios and face everyday gang violence, state repression, social exclusion, and forced migration in response to sociopolitical crisis. This book looks at how these young people engage with what the author calls “enchantment,” that is, how through musical practices they create worlds that escape, rupture, and critique dominant structures of power.  Stainova’s focus on artistic practice and enchantment allows her to theorize the successes and failures of political projects through the lens of everyday transformations in people’s lives.
 
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Soul Music
Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown
Joel Rudinow
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Exceptionally illuminating and philosophically sophisticated."
---Ted Cohen, Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago

"In this audacious and long-awaited book, Joel Rudinow takes seriously a range of interrelated issues that most music theorizing is embarrassed to tackle. People often ask me about music and spirituality. With Soul Music, I can finally recommend a book that offers genuine philosophical insight into the topic."
---Theodore Gracyk, Professor of Philosophy, Minnesota State University Moorhead

The idea is as strange as it is commonplace---that the "soul" in soul music is more than just a name, that somehow the music truly taps into something essential rooted in the spiritual notion of the soul itself. Or is it strange? From the civil rights movement and beyond, soul music has played a key, indisputable role in moments of national healing. Of course, American popular music has long been embroiled in controversies over its spiritual purity (or lack thereof). But why? However easy it might seem to dismiss these ideas and debates as quaint and merely symbolic, they persist.

In Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown, Joel Rudinow, a philosopher of music, takes these peculiar notions and exposes them to serious scrutiny. How, Rudinow asks, does music truly work upon the soul, individually and collectively? And what does it mean to say that music can be spiritually therapeutic or toxic? This illuminating, meditative exploration leads from the metaphysical idea of the soul to the legend of Robert Johnson to the philosophies of Plato and Leo Strauss to the history of race and racism in American popular culture to current clinical practices of music therapy.

Joel Rudinow teaches in the Philosophy and Humanities Departments at Santa Rosa Junior College and is the coauthor of Invitation to Critical Thinking and the coeditor of Ethics and Values in the Information Age.

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Sound and Form in Modern Poetry
Second Edition
Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Why are poems important? What do people mean when they use the word prosody? How does a poem read and sound? How does a poem's shape--its form--help to create its meaning? Sound and Form in Modern Poetry provides useful answers to these questions for readers of poetry. Through careful attention to the poems of modern masters, the book offers an accessible guide to the way today's poems really work, and to the way they are linked in style to poems of earlier times.
Poet, critic, and editor Robert McDowell has updated this classic text in the light of the poetic and critical developments of the last three decades. Segments on Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Jeffers, and Lowell, among other poets, have been greatly expanded, and Ashbery, Creeley, Ginsberg, Hall, Kees, Kumin, Levertov, Levine, O'Hara, Plath, Rich, Simpson, and Wilbur added, among others. The epilogue discusses a new generation of poets whose works will likely be read well into the next century-- among others, Thomas M. Disch, Rita Dove, Dana Gioia, Emily Grosholz, Mark Jarman, Molly Peacock, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Timothy Steele, Mary Swander, and Marilyn Nelson Waniek.
Over the last ten years, the most inspiring topic of conversation and argument among poets and their readers has been the resurgence of narrative and traditional forms. The new Sound and Form in Modern Poetry is a seminal text in this discussion, examining not only this movement but all of the important developments (Dadaism, Surrealism, Imagism, Language Poetry, and the Confessional School) that have defined our poetry in the twentieth century and have set the stage for poetry's continued life in the twenty-first. The original Sound and Form in Modern Poetry enjoyed extensive classroom use as a text; the revised version promises to be even more accessible, and more essential, for years to come.
The late Harvey Gross was Professor of Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Robert McDowell is publisher and editor of Story Line Press, and is also poet, critic, translator, fiction writer, and essayist.
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Sound Changes
Improvisation and Transcultural Difference
Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Sound Changes responds to a need in improvisation studies for more work that addresses the diversity of global improvisatory practices and argues that by beginning to understand the particular, material experiences of sonic realities that are different from our own, we can address the host of other factors that are imparted or sublimated in performance. These factors range from the intimate affect associated with a particular performer’s capacity to generate a distinctive “voicing,” or the addition of an unexpected sonic intervention only possible with one particular configuration of players in a specific space and time. Through a series of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania, Sound Changes offers readers an introduction to a range of musical expressions across the globe in which improvisation plays a key role and the book demonstrates that improvisation is a vital site for the production of emergent social relationships and meanings. As it does this work, Sound Changes situates the increasingly transcultural dimensions of improvised music in relation to emergent networks and technologies, changing patterns of migration and immigration, shifts in the political economy of music, and other social, cultural, and economic factors.

Improvisation studies is a recently developed, but growing, interdisciplinary field of study. The discipline—which has only truly come into focus in the early part of the twenty-first century—has been building a lexicon of key terms and developing assumptions about core practices. Yet, the full breadth of improvisatory practices has remained a vexed, if not impossibly ambitious, subject of study. This volume offers a step forward in the movement away from critical tendencies that tend to homogenize and reduce practices and vocabularies in the name of the familiar. Chapter authors include John Corbett, Jason Robinson, Kirstie Dorr, Beverley Milton-Edwards, Sally MacArthur, Waldo Garrido, Jemma Decristo, Mike Heffley, Monica Dalidowicz, and Hafez Modirzadeh.

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The Sound of Listening
Poetry as Refuge and Resistance
Philip Metres
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, and peace poetry; personal explorations of poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate Metres’s practice of listening in his 2015 work, Sand Opera.

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Sound Streams
A Cultural History of Radio-Internet Convergence
Andrew J. Bottomley
University of Michigan Press, 2020
In talking about contemporary media, we often use a language of newness, applying words like “revolution” and “disruption.” Yet, the emergence of new sound media technologies and content—from the earliest internet radio broadcasts to the development of algorithmic music services and the origins of podcasting—are not a disruption, but a continuation of the century-long history of radio. Today’s most innovative media makers are reintroducing forms of audio storytelling from radio’s past.

Sound Streams is the first book to historicize radio-internet convergence from the early ’90s through the present, demonstrating how so-called new media represent an evolutionary shift that is nevertheless historically consistent with earlier modes of broadcasting. Various iterations of internet radio, from streaming audio to podcasting, are all new radio practices rather than each being a separate new medium: radio is any sound media that is purposefully crafted to be heard by an audience.  Rather than a particular set of technologies or textual conventions, web-based broadcasting combines unique practices and features and ideas from radio history. In addition, there exists a distinctive conversationality and reflexivity to radio talk, including a propensity for personal stories and emotional disclosure, that suits networked digital media culture.  What media convergence has done is extend and intensify radio’s logics of connectivity and sharing; sonically mediated personal expression intended for public consideration abounds in online media networks.

Sound Streams marks a significant contribution to digital media and internet studies. Its mix of cultural history, industry research, and genre and formal analysis, especially of contemporary audio storytelling, will appeal to media scholars, radio and podcast practitioners, audio journalism students, and dedicated podcast fans.
 
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Sounding Dissent
Rebel Songs, Resistance, and Irish Republicanism
Stephen R. Millar
University of Michigan Press, 2020
The signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998, marked the beginning of a new era of peace and stability in Northern Ireland. As the public overwhelmingly rejected a return to the violence of the Troubles, loyalist and republican groups sought other outlets to continue their struggle. Music, which has long been used to celebrate cultural identity in the North of Ireland, became a key means of facilitating the continuation of pre-Agreement identity narratives in a “post-conflict” era.

Sounding Dissent draws on three years of sustained fieldwork within Belfast's rebel music scene, in-depth interviews with republican musicians, contemporary audiences, and former paramilitaries, as well as diverse historical and archival material, including songbooks, prison records, and newspaper articles, to understand the history of political violence in Ireland.The book examines the potential of rebel songs to memorialize a pantheon of republican martyrs, and demonstrates how musical performance and political song not only articulate experiences and memories of oppression and violence, but also play a central role in the reproduction of conflict and exclusion in times of peace.
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Sounding Like a No-No
Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era
Francesca T. Royster
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.

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Sounding Like a No-No
Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era
Francesca T. Royster
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.

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Sounding Out Pop
Analytical Essays in Popular Music
Mark Spicer and John Covach, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"A variety of approaches are brought to bear on fascinating repertoire, but with the underlying aim of better understanding some brilliant music. There’s nothing more exciting in music writing than something which entices you to listen to what’s familiar to you in a new way, and this collection brings such excitement in abundance."
---Allan Moore, author of Jethro Tull: Aqualung and Rock: The Primary Text

"These essays bring together a remarkable range of tools and perspectives to such diverse topics and contexts as the behind-the-scenes collaborations of composers, performers, arrangers, producers and engineers; pop culture; narratology; and race, politics and gender. The reader continuously benefits from a complementary lineup of sensitive ears that discover novelty in the familiar, exposing the heart of many rock and pop classics through imaginative and authoritative prose."
---Walter Everett, author of The Foundations of Rock and The Beatles as Musicians

The nine essays in Sounding Out Pop work together to map the myriad styles and genres of the pop-rock universe through detailed case studies that confront the music from a variety of engaging, thought-provoking perspectives---from historical to music-analytic, aesthetic to ethnographic, with several authors drawing liberally from ideas in other disciplines. The range of bands and artists covered is as vast and varied as the more than fifty-year history of pop and rock music, from the Coasters and Roy Orbison to Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Beck, Genesis, Tori Amos, and the Police. Together these diverse essays cover a broad spectrum of studies ideally suited for classroom use and for other readers interested in gaining a deeper knowledge of the way popular music works.

Mark Spicer is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His writings have appeared in Contemporary Music Review, Gamut, Music Theory Online, twentieth-century music, and other scholarly journals and essay collections.

John Covach is Professor of Music at the University of Rochester and Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music. He is the author of the college textbook What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History and the coeditor of Understanding Rock, American Rock and the Classical Music Tradition, and Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music.

Cover art credit: © iStockphoto.com/Aleksandar Dickov

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Sounding Together
Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century
Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-21st Century is a multi-authored, collaboratively conceived book of essays that tackles key challenges facing scholars studying music of the United States in the early twenty-first century. This book encourages scholars in music circles and beyond to explore the intersections between social responsibility, community engagement, and academic practices through the simple act of working together. The book’s essays—written by a diverse and cross-generational group of scholars, performers, and practitioners—demonstrate how collaboration can harness complementary skills and nourish comparative boundary-crossing through interdisciplinary research. The chapters of the volume address issues of race, nationalism, mobility, cultural domination, and identity; as well as the crisis of the Trump era and the political power of music. Each contribution to the volume is written collaboratively by two scholars, bringing together contributors who represent a mix of career stages and positions. Through the practice of and reflection on collaboration, Sounding Together breaks out of long-established paradigms of solitude in humanities scholarship and works toward social justice in the study of music.

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Sounds of the Underground
A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music
Stephen Graham
University of Michigan Press, 2016
In basements, dingy backrooms, warehouses, and other neglected places around the world music is being made that doesn't fit neatly into popular or classical categories and genres, whose often extreme sounds and tiny concerts hover on the fringes of these commercial and cultural mainstreams.

The term “underground music” as it’s being used here connects various forms of music-making that exist outside or on the fringes of mainstream institutions and culture, such as noise, free improvisation, and extreme metal. This is music that makes little money, that’s noisy and exploratory in sound and that’s largely independent from both the market and from traditional high art institutions. It sometimes exists at the fringes of these commercial and cultural institutions, as for example with experimental metal or improv, but for the most part it’s removed from the mainstream, “underground,” as we see with noise artists such as Werewolf Jerusalem or Ramleh, obscure black metal artists such as Lord Foul, and improvisers such as Maggie Nicols. In response to a lack of previous scholarly discussion, Graham provides a cultural, political, and aesthetic mapping of this broad territory. By outlining the historical background but focusing on the digital age, the underground and its fringes can be seen as based in radical anti-capitalist politics or radical aesthetics while also being tied to the political contexts and structures of late capitalism. The book explores these various ideas of separation and captures, through interviews and analysis, a critical account of both the music and the political and cultural economy of the scene.

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The Sources of Hojeda's La Cristiada
Sister Mary Edgar Meyer, O.S.F.
University of Michigan Press, 1953
La Cristiada, by Fray Diego de Hojeda, is one of the great religious epics of the seventeenth century. The present work, the result of a vast amount of research, attempts to discover the sources used by Hojeda. As one reads it, one feels that Hojeda must have had access to most, if not all, of the literary material available in his day—the classical, medieval, Renaissance, and contemporary literatures, sacred history, and mythology, and the works of the mystics and the patristic writers. La Cristiada, so baroque in its structure, is a mirror of the times and an epitome of the learning and culture that prevailed and to which one could attain during the Golden Age of Spain. The two chapters on legends and traditions make this source study of interest not only to scholars and students of Spanish literature, but also to students of Christian lore.
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Sources of the Synoptic Gospels
Carl S. Patton
University of Michigan Press, 1915
This volume considers recent investigations into the Synoptic Problem and its recent analysis, and pushes the question farther based on that body of research. Minute differences among versions of the Gospels are compared, toward arriving at a better sense of underlying textual transmission.
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The South Korean Film Industry
Sangjoon Lee, Dal Yong Jin, And Junhyoung Cho, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2024
As shown by the success of Squid Game and Parasite, South Korea’s film industry is producing films and original series for streaming services, film studios, and television stations worldwide. South Korea is now arguably considered one of the few countries outside the United States to have captivated the world’s hearts and minds through pop music, TV dramas, and film. Similarly, the exponential growth in the South Korean film industry has been mirrored by a growing body of industry and film policy forums and academic conferences in both the East and the West. 

The South Korean Film Industry is the first detailed scholarly overview of the South Korean film industry. The thirteen chapters discuss topics from short films to popular television series that have engaged global audiences. Contributors explore the major changes in South Korean film making, marketing, and in the international growth and popularity of South Korean films. By bringing together a wide range of academic specialists on the South Korean film industry, The South Korean Film Industry situates the current scholarship on South Korean cinema within the ongoing theoretical debates in contemporary global film studies. This volume offers invigorating discussions of the South Korean film industry, as well as its economic, political, and artistic impact on global, local, and regional film industries and cultures.
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The Southern Frontier
1670-1732
Verner W. Crane
University of Michigan Press, 1929
The Southern Frontier looks at the origins of Anglo-Americans in the Southeastern United States. It covers a time frame from the first settlements along the Carolina coast, to the Indian Revolt of 1715, to the genesis of Georgia as a colony, and a means to protect British interests in America. The struggles include Queen Anne's War, the Yamese War, and various diplomatic and militaristic struggles with the Native Americans and the Spanish.
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Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire
Claude Nicolet
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Drawing on unexpected texts both ancient and modern, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire offers startling insights into the character of Rome and its princeps-turned-emperor, Augustus. Claude Nicolet documents Roman expansion at the start of the early imperial period and explores how Romans came to map the world they knew and conquered. The roles of both the agrimensores, who worked in the state’s interest observing and recording new territories, and M. Vipsanius Agrippa, the sometime son-in-law of Emperor Augustus, are considered. Nicolet also presents the integral relations between territorial expansion and political expansion, as well as between propaganda cultivated in the national interest and propaganda designed to secure the status of the princeps as primus inter pares, first among equals.
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Space in Performance
Making Meaning in the Theatre
Gay McAuley
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Theater, as distinct from other dramatic media, is essentially a relationship between performer, spectator, and the space in which both come together. Space in Performance examines the way theater buildings function to frame the performance event, the organization of audience and practitioner spaces within the building, the nature of the stage and the modes of representation it facilitates, and the relationship between the real space of the theater and the fictional places that are evoked.
The book's theoretical and methodological framework is both semiotic and phenomenological, based in part from the seminal work of Anne Ubersfeld, from direct observation of the rehearsal process, and from documentation and analysis of professional performances. The situation of the academic observer in the rehearsal room has much in common with that of the ethnographer in the field, and contemporary ethnographic practice provides a third theoretical and methodological perspective to this study.
Performance studies is an emerging discipline, and it is still evolving appropriate methodologies. The multi-faceted approach adopted here will engage theater and performance studies specialists, those concerned with modes of representation in contemporary culture, and students of theater, semiotics, architecture, set design, acting and performance theory. It also offers a great deal to theater practitioners as well as to spectators interested in deepening their appreciation of theater art. It is written in a simple, accessible way, and the theory always emerges from descriptions of practice.
"An excellent study that imaginatively summarizes, synthesizes, and intelligently critiques a wide range of previous theory and practice while making an important new contribution to the field of theater studies." --Marvin Carlson, City University of New York
Gay McAuley is Director of the Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney.
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Spaces of Honor
Making German Civil Society, 1700-1914
Heikki Lempa
University of Michigan Press, 2021

The common understanding is that honor belongs to a bygone era, whereas civil society belongs to the future and modern society. Heikki Lempa argues that honor was not gone or even in decline between 1700 and 1914, and that civil society was not new but had long roots that stretched into the Middle Ages. In fact, what is peculiar for this era in Germany were the deep connections between practices of honor and civil society. This study focuses on collective actions of honor and finds them, in a series of case studies, at such communal spaces as schools, theaters, lunch and dinner tables, spas, workers’ strikes, and demonstrations. It is in these collective actions that we see civil society in making.

Spaces of Honor sees civil society not primarily as an idea or an intellectual project but as a set of practices shaped in physical spaces. Around 1700, the declining power of religious authorities allowed German intellectuals to redefine civil society, starting with a new language of honor. Then, in the middle of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of voluntary associations and public spaces turned it into reality. Here, honor provided cohesion. In the nineteenth century, urbanization and industrialization ushered in powerful forces of atomization that civil society attempted to remedy. The remedy came from social and physical spaces that generated a culture of honor and emotional belonging. We find them in voluntary associations, spas, revived guilds, and labor unions. By the end of the nineteenth century, honor was deeply embedded in German civil society.

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Spanish-Guarani Relations in Early Colonial Paraguay
Elman R. Service
University of Michigan Press, 1954
In this volume, Elman R. Service describes the Guarani culture at the time of Spanish colonization in Paraguay and explores the reasons why the encomienda system resulted in the rapid acculturation of the Guarani in this region.
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Speaking for Themselves
Ethnographic Interviews with Adults with Learning Disabilities
Paul J. Gerber, Ph.D. and Henry B. Reiff, Ph.D.
University of Michigan Press, 1991
While most people associate the term “learning disabilities” with children, or students, research has shown that these problems do not disappear in adulthood. As a result, interest in adults with learning disabilities is increasing. In Speaking for Themselves, nine adults with learning disabilities tell the "inside story" of how they deal with a very real handicap that the outside world does not see. Through their interview format, authors Paul J. Gerber and Henry B. Reiff take the reader beyond the usual boundaries of educational research and into the daily lives of fascinating individuals. Their subjects respond to in-depth to questions about careers, education, social and emotional concerns, daily living, and their own keys to success. Faced with a variety of challenges—from problems with processing language to difficulties in organizing daily routines—they describe their own strategies for coping with them, which are often amusing, sometimes sorrowful, and always intriguing. The subjects go on to offer their own first-hand definitions of learning disabilities and to give suggestions and advice not only to other adults who share their difficulties, but also to all of us who will come into contact with them. Their contributions produce a book that extends its interest not only to professionals in the field of learning disabilities, but to family members, friends, employers, educators, and psychologists. The interviews in this unique volume demonstrate that, for many individuals, learning disabilities do not preclude successful adjustment to adult life.
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Speaking in Social Contexts
Communication for Life and Study in the U.S.
Robyn Brinks Lockwood
University of Michigan Press, 2018
This text was written for students who want to live, study, and/or work in an English-speaking setting or are already doing so. Its goal is to help students survive interactional English in a variety of social, academic, and professional settings—for example, how to make small talk with recruiters at a job fair or when invited to dinner at their advisor’s house.

The text provides language to use for a variety of functions as they might related to life on a university campus: offering greetings and goodbyes, making introductions, giving opinions, agreeing and disagreeing, using the phone, offering assistance, asking for advice, accepting and declining invitations, giving and receiving compliments, complaining, giving congratulations, expressing condolences, and making small talk.  Users are also taught to think beyond the words and to interpret intonation and stress (how things sound).

Each of the 10 units includes discussion prompts, language lessons, practice activities, get acquainted tasks (interacting with native speakers), and analysis opportunities (what did they discover and what can they apply?).
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Speaking in Tongues
Languages at Play in the Theatre
Marvin Carlson
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Speaking in Tongues presents a unique account of how language has been employed in the theatre, not simply as a means of communication but also as a stylistic and formal device, and for a number of cultural and political operations. The use of multiple languages in the contemporary theatre is in part a reflection of a more globalized culture, but it also calls attention to how the mixing of language has always been an important part of the functioning of theatre.

The book begins by investigating various "levels" of language-high and low style, prose and poetry-and the ways in which these have been used historically to mark social positions and relationships. It next considers some of the political and historical implications of dialogue theatre, as well as theatre that literally employs several languages, from classical Greek examples to the postmodern era. Carlson treats with special attention the theatre of the postcolonial world, and especially the triangulation of the local language, the national language, and the colonial language, drawing on examples of theatre in the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Finally, Carlson considers the layering of languages in the theatre, such as the use of supertitles or simultaneous signing.

Speaking in Tongues draws important social and political conclusions about the role of language in cultural power, making a vital contribution to the fields of theatre and performance.

Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center. He is author of Performance: A Critical Introduction; Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present; and The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, among many other books.
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Speaking of Writing
Selected Hopwood Lectures
Nicholas Delbanco, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Essays on the art and craft of writing by some of the nation’s finest writers make up this rich collection, from Louise Bogan’s meditation on popular and unpopular poetry, to Saul Bellow’s assessment of the future of fiction, to Francie du Plessix Gray’s reflection on womenand Russian literature. Spanning five decades of writing, the essays address topics both timely and timeless in nature, and cover both the process and the product of writing.
 
These essays were originally presented at the Hopwood Lecture series at the University of Michigan in conjunction with the annual awarding of the Hopwood Prizes in creative writing. The internationally recognized awards are granted by the bequest of playwright Avery Hopwood (1884-1928), who sought to encourage student work in the fields of dramatic writing, fiction, poetry, and the essay. The essays speak to the apprentice writer, finding their focus in a twinned discussion of the craft of prose and the art of poetry. The authors share an assumption that literature matters, and vitally, to the culture it reports on and sustains.
 
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Speaking Our Selves
New Plays by African Women
Asiimwe Deborah Kawe and Robert H. Vorlicky, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Speaking Our Selves brings together plays by women writers from the under-represented African countries of Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Mali, Burundi, Benin, and Sudan, plus a play by award-winning Ugandan playwright and volume coeditor Asiimwe Kawe. Although the plays are united in presenting women as central figures who own their voices, they also represent a rich diversity of story-telling. Each unique dramaturgy is rooted in African forms of story-telling that occasionally—but not always—merge with recognizable Western forms to create hybrid, dramatic forms. These hybrid methods emphasize the striking ways in which African women writers continue to experiment with form, moving beyond Western-influenced dramaturgy if and when it jeopardizes an African dramaturgy of language, movement, and music, centered in African Cosmology.

The plays within Speaking Our Selves confront a range of ideas and issues, including women embracing the potential of agency in often contested subject positions; confronting their historical object positions in worlds of devastating patriarchal authority; resisting toxic masculinity and persistent, oppressive binaries of gender roles; finding power in communities of women; women’s increasing acumen in financial, business, and economic spheres; tensions between traditional religious tenets and efforts toward secularization; perpetual acts of violence toward women’s bodies; and the rise of mental health issues among girls and women. Readers and audiences are challenged not to be passive witnesses by observing from safe vantage points, but rather to be active participants in the stories being told.
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Speaking the Same Language
Speech and Audience in Thucydides' Spartan Debates
Paula Debnar
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The Peloponnesian War, which destroyed imperial Athens and ultimately Sparta as well, continues to fascinate students of history, politics, and human nature. Thucydides' account of the twenty-seven-year conflict charts the opposition between the two great powers of the classical Greek world and the ways of life they represented. Paula Debnar explores the collapse of these powers from a new perspective, examining the ways discourse changed under the strain of a long and costly war.
Speaking the Same Language seeks to recover the role played by the audiences within the History. By restoring the internal audiences to a more prominent place, Debnar emphasizes the perspective of the participants in the war and heightens the dramatic immediacy of the debates. She thoroughly analyzes twelve speeches delivered by or to the Spartans, demonstrating how the earlier speeches illustrate the role of discourse in the construction of Sparta's identity and the unification of her Dorian allies in the face of their primarily Ionian adversaries.
Combining close textual analysis with an examination of narrative and historical context, Debnar bridges the gap between literary and historical studies of Thucydides. Accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike, her work will interest those working in the fields of Greek literature, ancient historiography, rhetoric, political science, and ethnic studies.
Paula Debnar is Associate Professor of Classics, Mount Holyoke College.
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Spectacles of Reform
Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America
Amy E. Hughes
University of Michigan Press, 2014

In the nineteenth century, long before film and television brought us explosions, car chases, and narrow escapes, it was America's theaters that thrilled audiences, with “sensation scenes” of speeding trains, burning buildings, and endangered bodies, often in melodramas extolling the virtues of temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage. Amy E. Hughes scrutinizes these peculiar intersections of spectacle and reform, revealing the crucial role that spectacle has played in American activism and how it has remained central to the dramaturgy of reform.

Hughes traces the cultural history of three famous sensation scenes—the drunkard with the delirium tremens, the fugitive slave escaping over a river, and the victim tied to the railroad tracks—assessing how these scenes conveyed, allayed, and denied concerns about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These images also appeared in printed propaganda, suggesting that the coup de théâtre was an essential part of American reform culture. Additionally, Hughes argues that today’s producers and advertisers continue to exploit the affective dynamism of spectacle, reaching an even broader audience through film, television, and the Internet.

To be attuned to the dynamics of spectacle, Hughes argues, is to understand how we see. Her book will interest not only theater historians, but also scholars and students of political, literary, and visual culture who are curious about how U.S. citizens saw themselves and their world during a pivotal period in American history.

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Spectacular Disappearances
Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801
Julia H. Fawcett
University of Michigan Press, 2016
How can people in the spotlight control their self-representations when the whole world seems to be watching? The question is familiar, but not new. Julia Fawcett examines the stages, pages, and streets of eighteenth-century London as England's first modern celebrities performed their own strange and spectacular self-representations.  They include the enormous wig that actor Colley Cibber donned in his comic role as Lord Foppington--and that later reappeared on the head of Cibber's cross-dressing daughter, Charlotte Charke. They include the black page of Tristram Shandy, a memorial to the parson Yorick (and author Laurence Sterne), a page so full of ink that it cannot be read. And they include the puffs and prologues that David Garrick used to heighten his publicity while protecting his privacy; the epistolary autobiography, modeled on the sentimental novel, of Garrick's protégée George Anne Bellamy; and the elliptical poems and portraits of the poet, actress, and royal courtesan Mary Robinson, a.k.a. Perdita.

Linking all of these representations is a quality that Fawcett terms "over-expression," the unique quality that allows celebrities to meet their spectators' demands for disclosure without giving themselves away. Like a spotlight so brilliant it is blinding, these exaggerated but illegible self-representations suggest a new way of understanding some of the key aspects of celebrity culture, both in the eighteenth century and today. They also challenge divides between theatrical character and novelistic character in eighteenth-century studies, or between performance studies and literary studies today. The book provides an indispensable history for scholars and students in celebrity studies, performance studies, and autobiography—and for anyone curious about the origins of the eighteenth-century self.
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Specters of Cavafy
Maria Boletsi
University of Michigan Press, 2024
The Greek Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) has been recognized as a central figure in European modernism and world literature. His poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents? 

Specters of Cavafy broaches these questions by proposing spectral poetics as a novel approach to Cavafy’s work. Drawing from theorizations of specters and haunting, it develops spectrality as a lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as his poetry’s bearing on our present. By examining Cavafy’s spectral poetics, the book’s first part shows how conjurations work in his writings, and how the spectral permeates the entanglement of modernity and haunting, and of irony and affect. The second part traces the afterlives of specific poems in the Western imagination since the 1990s, in Egypt’s history of debt and colonization, and in Greece during the country’s recent debt crisis. Beyond its original contribution to Cavafy studies, the book proposes tools and modes of reading that are broadly applicable in literary and cultural studies.
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Spectral Characters
Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage
Sarah Balkin
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Theater’s materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy and depersonalization. Spectral Characters argues that modern dramatists in fact emphasized the extent to which humans are fictional, made and changed by costumes, settings, props, and spoken dialogue. Examining work by Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg, Genet, Kopit, and Beckett, the book takes up the apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture. The ghostly, vampiric, and telepathic qualities of these characters, Sarah Balkin argues, mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater. By considering characters whose bodies respond to language, whose attempts to realize their individuality collapse into inanimacy, and who sometimes don’t appear at all, the book posits a new genealogy of modernist drama that emphasizes its continuities with nineteenth-century melodrama and realism.

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Speculum Iuris
Roman Law as a Reflection of Social and Economic Life in Antiquity
Jean-Jacques Aubert and Boudewijn Sirks, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Roman public and private law regulated many aspects of life in Antiquity. The legal sources, statutes, juristic opinions, textbooks, documents and reports preserve a wealth of information that illuminates Roman society and economy. However, the use of this kind of evidence can be extremely difficult. With this volume, classicists, historians, and legal scholars propose various ways to integrate the legal evidence with other sources for ancient social and economic history.
Speculum Iuris examines the complex relationship between law and social practice from the particular angle of Roman legislation and jurisprudence as conditioned by or reacting to a specific social, economic, and political context. Using various strategies, the editors and contributors mine a huge body of texts to study attitudes and behaviors of the Roman upper class, whose social concerns are reflected in the development of legal rules.
A close reading of juristic opinions and Republican or imperial legislation allows the contributors to find rationales behind rules and decisions in order to explain practices and mentalities of the elite within a larger social context. This book demonstrates clearly that Roman law was not divorced from the realities of daily life, even if some jurists may have been working with purely hypothetical cases.
Speculum Iuris provides a multidisciplinary approach to the question of the interplay of legal and social forces in the Roman world. As such, it will be a helpful study for general classicists and ancient historians, as well as for legal historians, social historians, economic historians, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists.
Jean-Jacques Aubert is Professor of Latin Language and Literature, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Boudewijn Sirks is Professor of the History of Ancient Law, the History of European Private Law, and German Civil Law, Institute for the History of Law, Germany.
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A Spell on the Water
Marjorie Kowalski Cole
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"I couldn't put it down."
---Barbara Kingsolver

In 1955, Mary and Jim Leader have the American dream: careers in medicine; a young and healthy family; and even a vacation home---a shabby resort far from bustling Chicago. But one hot afternoon changes everything. Mary, now a widow, must find a path out of her grief into a future for herself and five small children.

In Michigan to sell the resort, Mary sees seven hawks riding the storm winds over the lake. This place, she thinks, can heal them with its wild beauty, so she moves her family to the northern lakeshore.

But Mary has forgotten what it's like to live in a tiny rural community, where almost everyone has a stake in maintaining the status quo. Secrets are kept at great cost as Mary's children often struggle to raise themselves. A coming-of-age story for each member of the family, this is a novel of quiet heroism and the power of personal freedom.

Praise for Marjorie Kowalski Cole and her previous novel, Correcting the Landscape:

". . . her writing is simple, vivid and gorgeous."
---Eugene Register-Guard

". . . a remarkable new talent. Critics have lined up to praise the book."
---Tucson Citizen

"Cole's style is subtle but engrossing . . . It is quite a debut."
---Booklist

Cover illustration: ©iStockphoto.com/ImagineGolf

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