Böcker av Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Pop Culture for Beginners promotes reflective engagement with the world around us and provides 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 pop culture "pivot points," including authenticity, 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 chapters in part two also include questions as beginning points for thinking critically and readings demonstrating relevant scholarly approaches to popular culture. Important vocabulary terms are included in a substantive glossary at the end.

Night Shyamalan represents the first serious academic engagement with auteur director M. Taken together, the collection recognizes and explores Shyamalan s "star status" and offers the concerted analysis that this cultural phenomenon requires.

From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time.

The first scholarly collection devoted to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, dissecting the film from diverse perspectives including gender and queer studies, disability studies, cultural studies, genre studies, and film studies.