Editors Note: The following books have been published by the U-M Press.
Why People Pay Taxes: Tax Compliance and Enforcement, edited by Joel Slemrod, director, Office of Tax Policy Research, School of Business Administration.
Tax evasion has become a pervasive problem in all societies, contributing to fiscal deficits and undermining the fairness and efficiency of the tax system. Why People Pay Taxes delves into the determinants of tax compliance and discusses strategies to curtail tax evasion. Based on the U-M’s Conference on Tax Compliance and Tax Law Enforcement, this volume assembles 12 articles by international experts from accounting, economics, law, psychology and sociology.
From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the “Good Enough” Mother, by Janice Doane, associate professor of English, St. Mary’s College; and Devon Hodges, professor of English and American studies, George Mason University.
In their latest collaboration, Doane and Hodges chart the development of “mother-centered” psychoanalysis through the work of Klein, Winnicott, Chodorow and Kristeva, and its influence on feminist thought in a number of fields.
That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton, edited by Susan Swartzlander, associate professor of English, Grand Valley State University; and Marilyn R. Mumford, professor of English, Bucknell University.
Although primarily known as a novelist and poet, it is May Sarton’s journals that have received the most praise and are probably responsible for her position as an increasingly important figure in American letters and culture. This collection of original essays is the first in-depth assessment of Sarton’s contributions to contemporary literature.
Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance, by Philip Auslander, associate professor of English, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Because postmodern culture is so thoroughly saturated by media images and information, contemporary political art has had to find ways of mounting a critique while acknowledging its position within the culture. In Presence and Resistance, Auslander illuminates how contemporary performance artists like Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Andy Kaufman and Sandra Bernhard have been able to do just that. He discusses the political nature of their performance, the understandings of postmodern culture that underpin it, and the particular strategies it employs.
Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism, edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar, assistant professor of English, Clemson University. The contributors to Rereading the New argue that we are in the midst of a critical paradigm shift. In the past two decades the literary world has celebrated the centenaries of Joyce, Eliot and Pound, the three pillars of Anglo-American modernism. Only now, Dettmar contends, are we starting to appreciate “what was apparent to the Modernists all along—that the monuments of High Modernism already contained within them the seeds of their own de(con)struction.”
