Signs of Life in the USA Readings on Pop Culture for Writers

by Maasik, Sonia; Solomon, Jack

• ISBN13: 9781319411862
• ISBN10: 131941186X
• Edition: 11th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2024-09-17
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

With readings from a diverse range of voices, Signs of Life in the USA helps you become a better reader and writer by giving you the tools to think critically about today’s popular culture.

Table of Contents

Preface for Instructors

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Popular Signs: Or, Everything You (Probably) Always Knew about American Culture (but Nobody Asked)

• The Rural Purge
• From Folk to For-Profit
• Pop Culture Goes To College
• The Semiotic Method
• Abduction and Overdetermination
• Cultural Mythologies
• Interpreting Popular Signs: or A Tale of Two Sitcoms
• A House Divided: or “Duck Dynasty,” Meet “Euphoria”
• The Classroom Connection
• Your Turn

Writing about Popular Culture

• Using Active Reading Strategies
• Prewriting Strategies
• Developing Strong Arguments about Popular Culture
• Conducting a Semiotic Analysis
• Reading Visual Images Actively
• Reading Essays about Popular Culture

- Jeremy Creek: The Anglerfish in the Machine: Horror and Re-enchantment In Stranger Things [student essay]

- Amy Lin: Barbie: Queen of Dolls and Consumerism [student essay]

- Irina Bodea: Banks: Progressive or Conventional? [student essay]

Conducting Research and Citing Sources

• Scott Jaschik: A Stand against Wikipedia
• Patti S. Caravello: Judging Quality on the Web
• Trip Gabriel: For Students in Internet Age, No Shame in Copy and Paste
• Audrey Campbell, The best writing AI practices unveiled: Mastering AI for simple tasks
• Synthesizing, Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Citing Sources
• In-Text Citations
• List of Works Cited

Chapter 1

American Paradox: Culture, Conflict, and Contradiction in the U.S.A.

• A House Invaded
• Six Ideological Conflicts Behind the Insurrection
• A City on a Hill
• The Summer of Love
• The Puritan Paradox
• The 1 Percent
• The Statue of Liberty vs. the Wall
• The End of the "Post-Racial" Society
• What's Red and Blue and Mad All Over?

The Readings

• Mark Murphy: The Uncivil War: How Cultural Sorting of America Divides Us
• Dan Rather and Elliot Kirscher: The MAGA Party
• Rhodes Cook, The “Big Sort” Continues, with Trump as a Driving Force
• Urban Institute: Debunking Three Myths about Rural America
• Michelle Goldberg: The Radicalization of the Young Right
• Michael Feola: Moms for Liberty is part of a long history of rightwing mothers’ activism in the US
• Rakesh Kochar and Stella Sechopoulos: How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades
• Constance Grady: Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now
• George Parker: Celebrating Inequality
• Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided

Chapter 2

An Irrepressible Conflict: Identity and Ideology in the New Millennium

• The Tuvel Affair
• Who Are You? The Personal is the Political Part 1: Sex and Gender
• The Personal is the Political Part 2: Race
• Intersections
• The Big Sort

The Readings

• Michael Omi: In Living Color: Race and American Culture
• Jens Manuel Krogstad and Kiana Cox: For Black History Month, a look at what Black Americans say is needed to overcome racial inequality
• Rachelle Hampton: Which People?
• Zahir Janmohamed: Your Cultural Attire
• Aaron Devor: Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes
• Deborah Blum: The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?
• Ellie Muir: A Timeline of JK Rowling’s comments about women and transgender rights
• Michael Hulshof-Schmidt: What’s in an Acronym? Parsing the LGBTQQIP2SAA Community
• Hanna Flint: How Tainted Is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 25 Years On?
• Alfred Lubrano: The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts

Chapter 3

The Digital Divide: Social Media, Politics, and the Marketing of America

• The Company Formerly Known as Twitter
• Whose Space?
• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• The New Panopticon
• Where Have All the Adverts Gone?
• Big Sister
• AI, or It's the End of the World as We Know It
• Back to the Future

The Readings

• Chandra Steele: Under Elon, Twitter's Political Divide Deepens Markedly
• Fonda Lee: Twitter Is the Worst Reader
• John Herrman: Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine
• Brooke Gladstone: Influencing Machines: The Echo Chambers of the Internet
• Jacob Silverman: “Pics or It Didn’t Happen”: The Mantra of the Instagram Era
• Kaitlyn Tiffany: No One Knows Exactly What Social Media Is Doing to Teens
• Rebecca Jennings: Stop Canceling Normal People Who Go Viral
• Elijah Clark: The Ethical Dilemma of AI in Marketing: A Slippery Slope
• Judy Estrin: I Helped Create the Internet, and I’m Worried About What It’s Doing to Young People
• Derek Thompson: The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Chapter 4

Consuming Passions: The Culture of American Consumption

• It's Not Your Grandfather's Automobile
• The Tesla Challenge
• #leggingsdaynd
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• Jeans, Spandex, Leotards, and Leg Warmers
• Life in a Consumer Culture
• Disposable Decades
• The Pandemic

The Readings

• James A. Roberts: The Treadmill of Consumption
• Naily Ordabayeva: How Liberals and Conservatives Shop Differently
• Avery Koop: Ranked: Gen Z’s Favorite Brands, Compared with Older Generations
• Jordyn Holman: Millennials Tried to Kill the American Mall, But Gen Z Might Save It
• Emily Stewart: The Bud Light boycott, explained as much as is possible
• Forrester: Three Consumer Behaviors That Emerged During the Pandemic Are Persisting
• Chris Arning: What Can Semiotics Contribute to Packaging Design?

Chapter 5

The Streaming of America: How TV Divides Us

• Yellowstone
• Something for Everyone
• From Mary Tyler Moore to The Handmaid’s Tale
• Litchfield Is the New Mayberry
• Writing about Television
• From Symbols to Icons
• And Now a Word from Our Sponsors
• Reality Bites

The Readings

• Caryn James: 1923 and the Violent TV Universe That Has Electrified the US
• Samuel Getachew: The Problem with Euphoria
• Kathryn VanAredonk: TV’s White Guys Are in Crisis
• Oihab Allal-Chérif: Black Mirror: The Dark Side of Technology
• Claire Miye Stanford: You’ve Got the Wrong Song: Nashville and Country Music Feminism
• Neal Gabler: The Social Networks
• Massimo Pigliucci: The One Paradigm to Rule Them All: Scientism and The Big Bang Theory
• Brittany Levine Beckman: Why We Binge-Watch Stuff We Hate

Chapter 6

The Hollywood Sign: The Culture of American Film

• The Pandora Perplex
• The Culture Industry
• Interpreting the Signs of American Film
• Repetition with a Difference
• Movies as Metaphors

The Readings

• Adam Scovell: How masterly horror Deliverance set a controversial trend
• Robert B. Ray: The Thematic Paradigm
• Linda Seger: Creating the Myth
• Nicholas Barber, The Little Mermaid: Why are films becoming so badly-lit and difficult to see?
• Brandon Ambrosino, Sound of Freedom: Is the child trafficking drama a watershed moment for 'faith-based' filmmaking?
• Maya Phillips: The Narrative Experiment That is the Marvel Cinematic Universe
• Mikhail Lyubansky: The Racial Politics of Black Panther
• Michael Parenti: Class and Virtue

Chapter 7

Tangled Roots: The Cultural Politics of Popular Music

• Get Back to Where You Once Belonged
• It’s Been a Long Time Coming
• The Turning Point
• Country Road
• The Ties That Don’t Bind
• Rebels with a Cause: The Rebirth of the Protest Song
• Coda: The Diva

The Readings

• Nolan Gasser: Music Is Supposed to Unify Us. Is the Streaming Revolution Fragmenting Us Instead?
• Brendan Morrow: Jason Aldean's “Try That in a Small Town” controversy, explained
• Conor Friedersdorf: Why Is Tracy Chapman at the Center of a Country-Music Controversy?
• Kenan Malik: The protest song that’s taken America by storm hits too many false notes
• Jon Meachan and Tim McGraw: How Country Music Explains America’s Divided History
• Karis Rivers, Hip-Hop’s Evolution: From Political Empowerment to Commercial Beast
• Nadra Nittle: Lil Nas X Isn’t an Anomaly
• Eileen O'Grady: Visions of power in Barbie, Beyoncé, Swift
• Christina Newland: A Cultural History of the Diva
• Dani Deahl: Monsta X and Steve Aoki: How K-pop Took Over YouTube