Pop Culture For Beginners

Pop Culture for Beginners promotes reflective engagement with the world around us and provides a set of tools for thinking critically about how meaning is created, reinforced, and circulated. Privileging a semiotic approach, the book’s first part, “The Pop Culture Toolbox,” outlines the development of pop culture studies; explains the semiotic framework; introduces students to a variety of critical lenses including Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and Critical Race Theory; and then offers an overview of several pop culture “pivot points” including authenticity, convergence culture, intersectionality, intertextuality, and subculture. The book’s second part provides a series of units, prepared in consultation with subject area experts, built around topics central to popular culture studies: television and film, music, comics, gaming, social media, and fandom. Each chapter includes “Your Turn” activities and discussion questions, as well as possible assignments and suggestions for further reading. The unit chapters in part two also include enabling questions as beginning points for thinking critically and sample readings demonstrating relevant scholarly approaches to popular culture; important vocabulary terms throughout are included in a substantive glossary at the end.

The concise introduction to the study of popular culture From Madonna and drag queens to cyberpunk and webzines, popular culture constitutes a common and thereby critical part of our lives. Yet the study of popular culture has been condemned and praised, debated and ridiculed. In Popular Culture: An Introduction, Carla Freccero reveals why we study popular culture and how it is taught in the classroom. Blending music, science fiction, and film, Freccero shows us that an informed awareness of politics, race, and sexuality is essential to any understanding of popular culture. Freccero places rap music, the Alien Trilogy and Sandra Cisneros in the context of postcolonialism, identity politics, and technoculture to show students how they can draw on their already existing literacies and on the cultures they know in order to think critically.Complete with a glossary of useful terms, a sample syllabus and extensive bibliography, this book is the concise introduction to the study of popular culture.

Chronicles the history of popular culture in America from 1900 through 1929, and discusses advertising, architecture, print media, entertainment, fashion, food, music, sports, art, and more; and includes time line for each decade.

Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives seeks to define pop culture by exploring the ways that it fulfills our human desire for meaning. The second edition investigates current contexts for popular culture, including the rise of the digital global village through new technology and offers up-to-date examples that connect with today's students.

Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, International Edition ventures beyond the history of pop culture to give readers the vocabulary and tools to address and analyze the contemporary cultural landscape that surrounds them. Moves beyond the history of pop culture to give students the vocabulary and tools to analyze popular culture suitable for the study of popular culture across a range of disciplines, from literary theory and cultural studies to philosophy and sociology Covers a broad range of important topics including the underlying socioeconomic structures that affect media, the politics of pop culture, the role of consumers, subcultures and countercultures, and the construction of social reality Examines the ways in which individuals and societies act as consumers and agents of popular culture

Modern media tools make it possible for anyone to publish in print, video or on the Web. This book is an inspirational how-to-do-it with history, do-in-a-day projects, interviews with young creators, all designed to empower young artists.

As the "culture of the people," popular culture provides a sense of identity that binds individuals to the greater society and unites the masses on ideals of acceptable forms of behavior. Lessons Learned from Popular Culture offers an informative and entertaining look at the social relevance of popular culture. Focusing on a wide range of topics, including film, television, social media, music, radio, cartoons and comics, books, fashion, celebrities, sports, and virtual reality, Tim Delaney and Tim Madigan demonstrate how popular culture, in contrast to folk or high culture, gives individuals an opportunity to impact, modify, or even change prevailing sentiments and norms of behavior. For each topic, they include six engaging and accessible stories that conclude with short life lessons. Whether you're a fan of The Big Bang Theory or Seinfeld, the Beatles or Beyoncé, Charlie Brown or Superman, there's something for everyone.

Popular Culture: An Introductory Text provides the means for a new examination of the different faces of the American character in both its historical and contemporary identities. The text is highlighted by a series of extensive introductions to various categories of popular culture and by essays that demonstrate how the methods discussed in the introductions can be applied. This volume is an exciting beginning for the study of the materials of everyday life that define our culture and confirm our individual senses of identity.

Popular Culture challenges readers to explore, engage in, and give serious consideration to topics that are often brushed off as merely "fun." The book combines original content based on current and emerging theories in the study of popular culture with a selection of articles and essays taken from a wide range of sources. Readers will learn about the use, evolution, and significance of conventional narrative and formulaic plot structure. Through popular culture artifacts, they will explore how assumptions based on gender-related traits and abilities generate expectations. In addition, readers will examine the simultaneous embracing of both application-based behavior and a craving for nostalgia and romance. They will investigate the cultural significance of heroes as metaphors for attitudes and behaviors that are valued by society. Popular Culture provides an inventive way to understand and interpret popular culture and how it relates to everyday life. It clarifies what constitutes popular culture and helps readers understand the importance of formal popular culture study. Eminently suitable for courses on the topic, Popular Culture can also be used in classes on communication, 20th century history, and humanities.