Signs of Life in the USA by Sonia Maasik; Jack Solomon - Ninth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store

Signs of Life in the USA

Readings on Popular Culture for WritersNinth Edition ©2018 Sonia Maasik; Jack Solomon

Signs of Life in the USA works in the classroom because students love to talk and write about popular culture. Signs of Life teaches students to read and write critically about pop culture by providing them with a conceptual framework known as semiotics, a field of study develop...

Read more
Students - Buy or Rent
Signs of Life in the USA by Sonia Maasik; Jack Solomon - Ninth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store

The only popular culture reader with a critical edge

Signs of Life in the USA works in the classroom because students love to talk and write about popular culture. Signs of Life teaches students to read and write critically about pop culture by providing them with a conceptual framework known as semiotics, a field of study developed specifically for the interpretation of culture and its signs.

Signs of Life, written by a prominent semiotician and an experienced writing instructor, has been extensively updated to account for the rapid evolution of contemporary trends and student interests. It features insightful themes with provocative and current reading selections that ask students to think analytically about America’s popular culture with questions such as: How has niche advertising impacted minorities? How has have television and the Internet shaped our current political climate? Signs of Life provides students with the academic language necessary to analyze
the significance of our shared cultural experiences.

Features

New to This Edition

New readings on today’s leading issues. Signs of Life in the USA helps promote lively teaching and high student interest—as well as strong student writing—by keeping up with the fast pace of popular culture, with thoroughly updated selections on the most current topics in film, television, and the world of American entertainment and politics:

  • Jia Tolentino charts the shift of self-empowerment for women from a cultural push to a marketing ploy.

  • Brian Dunning and Erin Lee debate the effectiveness of social media activism.

  • Brooke Gladstone takes a graphic-novel approach to understanding the echo-chambers of the Internet.

Back by popular demand, the chapter on American Paradox. This updated chapter explores the many conflicts and controversies that divide Americans today, examining how competing values are often held as equally American and showing how to read the signs of these contradictions in popular culture.

Reconceived chapters on the cultural forms of streaming media and the digital cloud keep pace with today’s students. A revised streaming media chapter, "On the Air: Television and Cultural Forms," asks students to consider the media they consume, think about what inspires it, and examine how it influences viewers. An updated chapter on the cloud and the technology in everyone’s back pocket, "The Cloud: Semiotics and the New Media," explores the democratizing dream and the surveillance dark sides of the Internet.

"As the second wave of young adults born and raised in a digital world come of age, Signs of Life in the USA is a text that is not only current but forward looking in its assessment of popular culture and the progressively diffuse nature of 21st century mass communication."

— James Geasor, Queensborough Community College

"Signs of Life is a challenging yet engaging text that will tap into your students' deep well of knowledge about the texts they read, the heroes they adore, and the tools they use."

— Tammy Cherry, Florida State College at Jacksonville, South

"Signs of Life has an effective, student-driven approach in that it leverages students’ familiarity with popular culture to lead them into analysis and critical thought."

— Wallace Cleeves, University of California at Riverside

Digital Options

EPUB3_EBOOK icon

E-book

Read online (or offline) with all the highlighting and notetaking tools you need to be successful in this course.

Table of Contents

Preface for Instructors

INTRODUCTION

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

American Civil War
From Folk to For-Profit　
Pop Culture Goes to College　
The Semiotic Method
Abduction and Overdetermination　
Interpreting Popular Signs: The War Against Everybody
The Classroom Connection　
Of Myths and Men　
Getting Started

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

*ELIJAH GREEN:　Alfred Lubrano: The Shock of Myopia [student essay]

AMY LIN:　Barbie: Queen of Dolls and Consumerism [student essay]

ROSE SOROOSHIAN:　The Walking 99 Percent: An Analysis of The Walking Dead in the Context of the 2008 Recession [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

　

Chapter 1.

Consuming Passions: The Culture of American Consumption

LAURENCE SHAMES:　The More Factor

PAIRED READINGS: UNDERSTANDING SHOPPING

ANNE NORTON:　The Signs of Shopping

MALCOLM GLADWELL:　The Science of Shopping

*MICHAEL POLLAN:　Supermarket Pastoral

Credit Card Barbie　[photograph]

JON MOOALLEM:　The Self-Storage Self

*CHRIS ARNING:　What Can Semiotics Contribute to Packaging Design?

JAMES A. ROBERTS:　The Treadmill of Consumption

STEVE McKEVITT:　Everything Now

*TROY PATTERSON:　The Politics of the Hoodie

THOMAS FRANK: Commodify Your Dissent

　

Chapter 2.

Brought to You B(u)y: The Signs of Advertising

When You Come Home　[advertisement]

JACK SOLOMON:　Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising

PAIRED READINGS: CREATING CONSUMERS

JAMES B. TWITCHELL:　What We Are to Advertisers

STEVE CRAIG:　Men’s Men and Women’s Women

*JIA TOLENTINO: How "Empowerment" Became Something for Women to Buy

*ALEX MAYYASI: How Subarus Came to Be Seen as Cars for Lesbians

*JESSICA CONTRERA: Most Young People Don't Vote—Condescending to Them Doesn't Help

*KALLE OSKARI MATTILA: The Age of the Wordless Logo

JULIET B. SCHOR:　Selling to Children: The Marketing of Cool

*STEPHANIE MILLER: The Power of Play: Gamification Can Change Marketing

JULIA B. CORBETT:　A Faint Green Sell: Advertising and the Natural World

Portfolio of Advertisements

Bose

Buffalo Exchange

California Walnuts

Limbo

Sanuk

Shinola

Air Canada

　

Chapter 3.

On the Air: Television and Cultural Forms

NEAL GABLER:　The Social Networks

PAIRED READINGS: Signifying Women on TV

*ANNA KESZEG: What Their Clothes Tell Us About Those Girls

CLAIRE MIYE STANFORD:　You’ve Got the Wrong Song: Nashville and Country Music Feminism

*JOHN SHERMAN: The New Normative: Queer Politics in The Outs

*OLIVIA GOLDHILL: Trump Supporters Are Living in a Reality Shaped by Television

NICK SERPE:　Reality Pawns: The New Money TV

*EMILY NUSSBAUM: The Aristocrats: The Graphic Arts of Game of Thrones

*MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI: The One Paradigm to Rule Them All: Scientism and The Big Bang Theory

*CLARA McNULTY-FINN: The Evolution of Rap

　

Chapter 4.

The Hollywood Sign: The Culture of American Film

ROBERT B. RAY:　The Thematic Paradigm

PAIRED READINGS: Fantasy and Film

CHRISTINE FOLCH:　Why the West Loves Sci-Fi and Fantasy: A Cultural Explanation

*ABRAHAM RIESMAN: What We Talk about When We Talk about Batman and Superman

LINDA SEGER:　Creating the Myth

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ:　The Offensive Movie Cliché That Won’t Die

HELENA ANDREWS:　The Butler versus The Help: Gender Matters

Lee Daniels’ The Butler　[movie poster]

JESSICA HAGEDORN:　Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck

MICHAEL PARENTI:　Class and Virtue

MICHAEL AGRESTA:　How the Western Was Lost — and Why It Matters

DAVID DENBY:　High-School Confidential: Notes on Teen Movies

　

Chapter 5.

The Cloud: Semiotics and the New Media

INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC AGENDA: Students Addicted to Social Media

PAIRED READINGS: The Digital Panopticon

*RONALD J. DEIBERT: Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet

JOSEPH TUROW:　The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth

*ERIN LEE: How Effective is Social Media Activism?

*BRIAN DUNNING: Slacktivism: Raising Awareness

*BROOKE GLADSTONE: Influencing Machines: The Echo Chambers of the Internet

*JOHN HERRMAN: Inside Facebook's (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine

*TIMOTHY B. LEE: Pokemon Go is Everything that is Wrong with Late Capitalism

*NANCY JO SALES: From the Instamatic to Instagram: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

*DANAH BOYD: It's Complicated: MySpace vs. Facebook

*S. CRAIG WATKINS: The Evolution of #Black Twitter

Navigating On- and Offline Lives　[photograph]

　

Chapter 6.

My Selfie, My Self: Identity and Ideology in the New Millennium

MICHAEL OMI:　In Living Color: Race and American Culture

PAIRED READINGS: PERFORMING GENDER

AARON DEVOR:　Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes

DEBORAH BLUM:　The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?

Gender Identity Online　[photograph]

*MICHAEL HULSHOF-SCHMIDT: What’s in an Acronym? Parsing the LGBTQQIP2SAA Community

KEVIN JENNINGS:　American Dreams

*SAMANTHA RAPHELSON: From GIs to Gen Z (Or Is It iGen?): How Generations Get Nicknames

RACHEL LOWRY:　Straddling Online and Offline Profiles, Millennials Search for Identity

*BRITTANY COOPER: Hollywood’s Post-Racial Mirage: How Pop Culture Got Gentrified

*LILLIANA MASON: Why Are Americans So Angry This Election Season?

　

Chapter 7.

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

*BARBARA EHRENREICH: Bright-Sided

PAIRED READINGS: The Consequences of Contradictions

*JEFFREY FLEISHMAN: How an Angry National Mood is Reflected in Pop Culture

*JIM TANKERSLEY: Why the Upper Middle Class Might be the Real Target of Today's Anger

GEORGE PACKER:　Celebrating Inequality

ALFRED LUBRANO:　The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts

RANDALL KENNEDY:　Blind Spot

MARIAH BURTON NELSON:　I Won. I’m Sorry

WADE GRAHAM:　Are We Greening Our Cities, or Just Greenwashing Them?

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Index of Authors and Titles

Sonia Maasik

The coeditors are successful textbook authors who, between them, have over fifty years of teaching experience in the college classroom. Sonia Maasik, a lecturer in the UCLA Writing Programs, has taught writing from developmental to advanced levels, and coordinates training for UCLA writing programs' teaching assistants. Jack Solomon, a professor of English at California State University, Northridge, teaches literature and critical theory, along with his graduate and undergraduate classes on popular cultural semiotics, and is often interviewed by the media for analysis of current events and trends. He is the author of The Signs of Our Time (1988) and Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age (1988).  The two together have published Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, Sixth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009) and California Dreams and Realities, Third Edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).

Jack Solomon

The coeditors are successful textbook authors who, between them, have over fifty years of teaching experience in the college classroom. Sonia Maasik, a lecturer in the UCLA Writing Programs, has taught writing from developmental to advanced levels, and coordinates training for UCLA writing programs' teaching assistants. Jack Solomon, a professor of English at California State University, Northridge, teaches literature and critical theory, along with his graduate and undergraduate classes on popular cultural semiotics, and is often interviewed by the media for analysis of current events and trends. He is the author of The Signs of Our Time (1988) and Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age (1988).  The two together have published Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, Sixth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009) and California Dreams and Realities, Third Edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).

Instructor Resources

Need instructor resources for your course?

Unlock Your Resources

Instructor Resources

Download Resources

You need to sign in to unlock your resources.

request locked icon

Editor's Notes for Signs of Life in the USA (Online Only)

Sonia Maasik; Jack Solomon | Ninth Edition | ©2018 | ISBN:9781319186555
request locked icon

Signs 8e to 9e Transition Guide

request locked icon

Signs of Life in the USA 9e Alternate Thematic Arrangements