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.

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.

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.

Movies, TV Shows and Video Games oh my! Teens and Tweens are into so many things and reading can be nothing more than a second thought, which can make it hard to find the right book they might like to read. In Pop Culture A Guide to Getting Teens & Tweens to Read Through Movies, TV Shows, and Video Games the author explores using these mediums to put books into their hands. The author shows you how he uses pop culture to find books his teen and tweens might like with read-a-likes. What books might read like: * The Legend of Zelda* Pacific Rim* Doctor Who * Warm Bodies * Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D. * Under the Dome* Downton Abbey * Call of Duty * Precious

Why bring pop culture into the composition classroom? It's something students know and can get passionate about, and it also functions as a bridge to academic culture and concerns. THE POP CULTURE ZONE: WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT POPULAR CULTURE, 2nd Edition, focuses on students' relationship with pop culture - such as film, television, social networks, and advertisements - and how this relationship can help them become better critical thinkers, readers, and writers. Students learn to listen to viewpoints that differ from their own, summarize their views effectively, compare and contrast, and present their ideas in a way that creates a continuing conversation of ideas.

What is pop culture? Why do we so often hate to love it and love to hate it? What makes us embrace parts of it and not others? Marcel Danesi explores our human desire for meaning and the need to symbolize it in music, language, art, and other creative forms. He offers a variety of perspectives to help us understand the products of popular culture_from music and websites to fads, celebrities, and more_tapping into the fun of pop culture without making us feel guilty for enjoying it.

During the first decade of this millennium Germany’s largest ethnic minority—Turkish Germans—began to enjoy a new cultural prominence in German literature, film, television and theater. While controversies around forced marriage and “honor” killings have driven popular interest in the situation of Turkish-German women, popular culture has played a key role in diversifying portrayals of women and men of Turkish heritage. This book documents the significance of marriage in 21st-century Turkish-German culture, unpacking its implications not only for the cultural portrayals of those of Turkish background, but also for understandings of German identity. It sheds light on the interactions of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in contemporary Germany. This book explores four notions of marriage in popular culture: forced marriage; romantic marriage; intercultural marriage; and gay marriage. Over five chapters, the book shows that in popular culture marriage is conventionally portrayed as little more than a form of oppression for Turkish-German women and gay men. The state of Turkish matrimony is seen as characterized by coercion, lack of choice, familial duty and “honor,” even violence. In German culture, by contrast, marriage stands for individual choice, love and equality. However, within comedy genres such as “chick lit”, “ethno-sitcom” and wedding film, there have been attempts to challenge the monolithic power of these gender stereotypes. This study finds that, in grappling with the legacy of these stereotypes, these genres reveal a yearning within German popular culture for the very kinds of “traditional” gender roles Turkish Germans are imagined to inhabit. The book provides a comprehensive account of the multiple ways in which the diverse portrayals of marriage shape views of Turkish Germans in popular culture, and are also revealing of the role of gender in contemporary Germany. It investigates some key genres—autoethnography, chick lit, ethno-sitcom, wedding film, “gay” Bildungsroman, documentary theater—within which questions of gender and cultural difference are “framed”. In new and innovative close readings of literary, filmic, television and dramatic texts, the work reveals the broad significance of cultural portrayals of Turkish-German intimacy.