University of Michigan Press Blog

Press Author Jill Dolan Wins Prestigious George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism

Congratulations to Jill Dolan, author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991), Presence and Desire (1994), and Utopia in Performance (2005) and editor of A Menopausal Gentleman (2011), for winning the prestigious 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. The award, administered by Cornell University, carries a $10,000 prize and was bestowed upon Dolan for her insightful essays on her blog, The Feminist Spectator. This marks the first year the award has been given to a blog.

Read the full award announcement here. The Guardian also published a great spotlight on Dolan and the significance of such a major award going to a blog.

The Chronicle Revisits a "Rogue Scholar"

Richard W. Bailey's 2003 book, Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, has inspired a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Lingua Franca blog. "Edward H. Rulloff was so well-known in his time that he was the subject of two contemporary biographies," blogger Alan Metcalf notes, but Rulloff's name has been scrubbed from the field of linguistics due to his other career--a life of crime--which ultimately led to his execution, cutting short his research on what Rulloff promised would be a revolutionary new philological theory.

Read the whole post over at the Chronicle, or check out Bailey's book for the whole sordid story!

Duderstadt Weighs In as New York Times Debate Over College Sports Continues

Sunday's New York Times featured an article titled "How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life," which examines long-simmering issues of commercialization in college sports--a topic the paper recently reignited with two controversial opinion pieces by columnist Joe Nocera. This time, education writer Laura Pappano compared prestigious universities' academic renown with those same universities' famous football and basketball teams. "Ohio State boasts 17 members of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, three Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners, 35 Guggenheim Fellows and a MacArthur winner," Pappano writes. "But sports rule." She also discusses how the extraordinary popularity of sports leads to coaches receiving multi-million-dollar salaries while professors struggle to receive funding for travel.

In this context, Pappano quotes University of Michigan President Emeritus James J. Duderstadt, author of Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President's Perspective, which continues to be every bit as relevant today as it was upon publication in 2000. Duderstadt told the Times, "Nine of 10 people don't understand what you are saying when you talk about research universities. But you say 'Michigan' and they understand those striped helmets running under the banner.

Also relevant to the debate over the proper role of sports and treatment of college athletes is Brian L. Porto's The Supreme Court and the NCAA: The Case for Less Commercialization and More Due Process in College Sports, published this month by U-M Press.

Hair That Touches Heaven

University of Michigan Press author Bill Talen presented his unique brand of evangelism last week at Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC. Previewing the event, where Talen discussed his Reverend Billy persona and recent book, The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping, the Washington Post's free daily Express looked at Talen's history as a performer.

"Reverend Billy has hair so high it practically touches heaven," the Express article begins. "He wears a white suit and a collar that marks him as a man of God." But the sins Reverend Billy preaches against are not the usual fare, but rather the modern trangressions of rampant consumerism and corporate malfeasance. Talen, as Reverend Billy, has been active in the Occupy protests and has staged demonstrations in malls, bank lobbies, Starbucks outlets, and other locations where the presence of a sizable choir singing gospel music and chanting slogans are likely to have their message amplified. Reverend Billy's shows are "part worship service, political rally and performance art," Express says, representing a "satiric continuation of the tradition of oration and preaching in America."

The Reverend Billy Project is available now, and be on the lookout for the Elvis-haired preacher at a venue near you.

Duderstadt comments on NY Times college sports op-ed

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera sparked no small amount of controversy with his January 1 opinion piece, "Let's Start Paying College Athletes." Nocera argued that the current system, in which student-athletes are forbidden from accepting payment of any kind under NCAA rules, "enables misconduct to flourish" because players feel that the universities, conferences, and NCAA are taking advantage of their skills. Unlike most intercollegiate sports, the columnist said, college football and men's basketball are a big business, with sometimes millions of dollars paid to coaches and billions paid for advertising on televised tournaments. Nocera notes that "having universities in charge of a major form of American entertainment is far from ideal" but says the best approach is to acknowledge, rather than deny, the commercialization, "pay the work force."

James Duderstadt, President Emeritus of the University of Michigan and author of Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President's Perspective--which is highly critical of the commercialization of college sports--offered the following response to Nocera' op-ed.

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I had several conversations with Joe Nocera during his development of this article.  Actually, I think that he believes that the best solution for higher education is to reject the commercial entertainment business of big-time college sports and return to an Ivy model.

But the question is how to get from here to there. By first making a powerful case that the current model is built on the exploitation of young student athletes–-they live in poverty, less than half will ever get a college degree (and those that do usually get a meaningless degree), and they put their future health at great risk–-all for the obscene wealth of coaches, ADs, presidents, the NCAA, the networks, and others and then proposing that if you are going to exploit them, you at least ought to pay them, the hope is that folks will realize just how crazy it is to depend on colleges to offer this public entertainment.

Nocera's proposal to pay college athletes could light a backfire to control the further spread of commercialism in big-time college sports by suggesting that the real "stars" of this entertainment industry are being exploited and deserve some compensation from greedy coaches, ADs, NCAA brass, and university presidents. By suggesting that  big-time football and basketball are really commercial entertainment industries based on a "plantation" philosophy (aka Taylor Branch) of exploitation, Nocera might create an Occupy-like groundswell of demands that the players deserve their fair share (which certainly isn't the current model of athletic "scholarships" controlled by the coaches, which amounts to indentured servitude. )

One would hope is that this possibility is terrifying enough to the current forces controlling the enterprise (ADs, presidents, perhaps even governing boards) that they will be receptive to throttling things back a bit.

Outdoors writer calls Jerry Dennis "a national treasure"

Reviewing The Windward Shore, Michigan outdoors writer Dave Richey described author Jerry Dennis as "a national treasure" and said of Dennis' latest book, "We see, feel, hear, taste and touch winter along the Great Lakes, and we rejoice with the author as he examines everything about winter in this area."

The Windward Shore has garnered enthusiastic praise since its release in September, and Dennis has given popular readings from the book throughout Michigan and the Midwest. Here, Dennis collects his thoughts and reflections on nature as he recounts several walks throughout the Great Lakes region after a knee injury forced him to live life at a slower pace.

Richey, himself a prominent nature writer who retired from the Detroit News in 2003, concluded his review calling The Windward Shore "a truly wonderful read by a favorite author."

WSJ Marketplace Praises 'Open Wound'

Marketwatch, part of the Wall Street Journal family of web sites, featured Jason Karlawish's Open Wound as the only fiction title on its list of "Health Books That Get Your Blood Pumping."

"Health care is likely to resurface next year as a major topic ahead of the presidential election," the article begins. "A handful of books published this year seek to challenge or explain how our standards of medical care in the U.S. have emerged."

Listing Open Wound among several recent non-fiction books, reviewer Kristen Gerencher says of Karlawish's book, "In this historical novel, [Beaumont and St. Martin] become entwined in each other’s lives medically, financially and even legally. Karlawish sketches their fraught relationship in the ensuing decades artfully, with clear relevance to the ethical questions of modern medicine."

Open Wound is available now from the University of Michigan Press.

'Windward Shore' author Jerry Dennis on Minnesota Public Radio

Acclaimed Great Lakes author Jerry Dennis recently appeared on Minnesota Public Radio to discuss his new book, The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes (University of Michigan Press, 2011) and his abiding interest in the region. Joined by fellow nature writer Darby Nelson, Dennis spoke on his appreciation for Thoreau, the roots of his own writing, the improbable hoax of whales in Lake Michigan, and more.

"I have always been fascinated with the contradictions in human nature when it comes to nature," Dennis said on the Midday program. "As I've spent twenty-some years studying the Great Lakes and writing about them, I've seen them as a very good example of that. This is a place we love, yet we dump our sewage overflow into it. Our industrial waste for many, many years was dumped into them. We still dump billions of gallons of agricultural waste--inadvertantly in most cases, but it still ends up there. Every time we have a major thunderstorm, huge amounts of water flood our sewage treatment plants, millions and sometimes billions of gallons of untreated sewage go into our lakes. I wanted to understand this better, as well, and thought, what is our relationship with nature and why is it so central to our existence and our experience as human beings? And why are we short sighted? Why do we not take a more active role in protecting these places that we claim to love?"

Listen to the entire broadcast online at Minnesota Public Radio. Jerry Dennis's The Windward Shore is available now.

Q&A with Ruth A. Miller, author of 'Seven Stories of Threatening Speech'

In her new book Seven Stories of Threatening Speech: Women's Suffrage Meets Machine Code, Professor Ruth A. Miller examines the functions and implications of speech divorced from any human speaker, as well as from any ideological content it might contain.

University of Michigan Press: First, Ruth, what does it mean for speech to be “threatening,” aside from a specific verbal threat against another person?

There are three ways to approach this question.  The first is to think about what sort of speech, historically, has been criminalized or denied protection.  Even in the United States, where free speech is often characterized as the fundamental right, a person can be convicted of treason solely because of speech.  In other national and transnational contexts, hate speech is similarly illegal.  Both of these are instances of speech itself, regardless of context, speaker, or audience, defined as a materially criminal act against a particular legal or political order. 

A second, and related, way to approach this question is from the direction of classical discourse analysis.  Here, speech is threatening if it contributes to a discursive field in which a particular, and particularly oppressive, mode of embodied subjectivity becomes the norm.  Hate speech, then, becomes threatening not because it undermines a legal ideal—say, political equality—but because it produces or re-produces violent modes of existence.

Both of these interpretations of threatening speech recognize the material or physical quality of language.  Each assumes speech to be an act in and of itself.  Each also limits speech to the human sphere, and thereby misses an aspect of threatening speech that Seven Stories tries to highlight.  Namely, a third way to describe speech, or speech acts, as dangerous is to discuss the work of language not on political or biological bodies (or political or biological bodies alone) but on systems and environments.  Indeed, one of the running themes of the book is that as much as historical writing on or about threatening speech may have been concerned with sovereignty or subjectivity, it has been equally concerned with systems and environments.  We just have to expand our definition of “materiality” to recognize this interest.

Q&A with Ole Bjerg, author of 'Poker: The Parody of Capitalism'

The popularity of poker is on the rise not just in the United States but throughout the world. A number of guides and strategies have been published to help players navigate the complexities of the game, but there are few studies of how poker functions as a game and its meaning both to players and the broader culture. Ole Bjerg's new book, Poker: The Parody of Capitalism represents an intriguing new scholarly perspective on poker, capitlalism, and the surprising ways one relates to the other. Bjerg is a sociologist and associate professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, and we spoke with him briefly about Poker, available now from the University of Michigan Press

University of Michigan Press: To begin with, I’m hoping you can talk a little about how poker functions as a “parody” of capitalism. Briefly, what do you mean by this?

Ole Bjerg: The notion of parody is a concept that I have found in Baudrillard. The idea is that games in general and poker in particular seem to simulate features of the ordinary or "serious" non-game world. I demonstrate that the way money circulates in No-Limit Texas Hold'Em, which is currently the most popular form of poker, is comparable to the way that money circulates in contemporary financial capitalism. However, the difference between capitalism and poker is that the former comes with a whole ideological system of explanation and justification while the latter makes no attempt to justify itself. Poker does not pretend to be fair, efficient, or productive. It just is. This means that the parody shows us the mechanisms of the system but without the ideological superstructure.

Your book considers poker as an expression of culture, along the lines of art and literature. What does poker tell us about the people who play it and the cultures to which they belong?

My research has shown that different people have very different reasons for playing poker. This is one of the faschinating features of the game.

It enables people to play with very different emotional investments.

Some play just for amusement. Some play because the dream of being professionals. Some are professionals. Some play because they are compulsive gamblers. And even the ones that are compulsive gamblers have different attachments to the game. However, if there is one thing that all players have in common, I think it is the sensation that there is something in poker which transcends the ordinary life outside of poker.

People who do not play poker themselves often tend to think that poker players play to win money. This is much too simple. People play poker to play poker. One of my favorite quotes from the reservoir of poker folklore is by Nick "the Greek" Dandalos: "The next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing." I think that sums up beautifully what poker is about.

Continuing the analogy, can there be a “great work” of poker, which I would think would amount to an extraordinarily well-played hand?

Yes, certainly. "Great works of poker" come into being precisely at those moments when the game seems to transcend life itself. Poker provides the player with the opportunity to test and display character.

Great works of poker come into being when the player has the courage and wit to become one with the game in a way that makes it seem as if the game itself is on his side. Similar moments may happen in music when the musician becomes one with the music.