Fluent Essays

Before reading pages 1-19, review the questions below so you will have an idea of what to highlight/underline in your book. Answer the following questions completely. Some might require a simple phrase for a complete answer, while others might require a sentence or two or three. All of these questions can be answered from the reading, but it may take careful reading and re-reading to understand them completely.1. Explain the semiotic method.2. What are two or three political/social events the author mentions from 2016 that relate to the battles between Captain America and Iron man, between Batman and Superman, and between the Lannisters and the Starks (the last one is from Game of Thrones)?3. Explain Denotation and Connotation as they relate to reading popular cultural signs.4. What connotative read (from a feminist perspective) does the author suggest is possible for the TV sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s?5. In your own words, explain Abduction as it relates to semiotics.6. What does it mean that cultural signs are usually overdetermined?7. What does the current trend of anti-hero characters in popular culture reflect about that culture?8. Through abductive reasoning, are you trying to prove your argument as true, or persuade your audience that your argument is valid? What is the difference?9. What is another word for mythology that the author suggests?10. Briefly discuss a connotative (social/political) interpretation of one of your favorite TV shows or movies (just like the ones discussed for sitcoms in question #4). eng101_1_19.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview Introduction POPULAR SIGNS Or, Everything You Always Knew about American Culture (but Nobody Asked) American Civil War In the summer and fall of 2016, Iron Man went to war against Captain America, Batman squared off against Superman, the war between the Lannisters and the Starks entered its sixth year, and Donald Trump captured the American presidency. These events were not unrelated. That is because, by the seventeenth year of the new millennium — and the ninth since the beginning of the Great Recession — America appeared to be splitting apart, and not simply along such traditional sectarian lines as Democrat versus Republican. We also saw Democrat versus Democrat (in the Clinton versus Sanders contest) and Republican versus Republican (as the existing party leadership largely turned its back on the Trump insurgency). Black Lives Matter contended not only with social injustice but with prior generations of civil rights activists; Western ranchers carried the American flag in their armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge; and five members of the Dallas Police Department were shot and killed as they provided security for a protest against police brutality. At a time when social conflict in the nation had grown to proportions not seen since the 1960s, then, it was not at all surprising that America’s popular culture would reflect it. Nor was it surprising that a well-known reality TV star would exploit that conflict to stage a successful presidential campaign. For in America today, popular culture isn’t just about entertainment, and entertainment isn’t simply a matter of leisure-time relaxation and recreation. In an era when digital technology can bring entertainment into the workplace, and work can be performed while being entertained, the former demarcations between what French sociologist Henri Lefebvre called “everyday life” and “festival,” or workaday and play, have crumbled, creating a world in which entertainment reflects reality, and reality is shaped by entertainment. That is why we have written this book. Treating American popular culture as a system of signs that can tell us about who and where we are in our history, Signs of Life in the U.S.A. will teach you how to read — or interpret — these signs, while at the same time teaching you the critical thinking skills necessary to write strong university-level papers and arguments. Accordingly, each chapter in this book focuses upon a particular segment of popular culture and, by way of readings, images, and assignments, guides you through the process that will help you analyze the significance of the full range of our everyday lives, behaviors, and entertainments. We will return shortly in this Introduction to the signs of social disaffection that we find in contemporary popular culture, but first let’s look at just what the phrase “popular culture” means and why it’s important to think critically about it. From Folk to For-Profit Traditionally, popular, or “low,” culture constituted the culture of the masses. It was set apart from “high” culture, which included classical music and literature, the fine arts and philosophy, and the elite learning that was the province of the ruling classes who had the money and leisure necessary to attain it — and who were often the direct patrons of high art and its creators. Low culture, for its part, had two main sides. One side, most notoriously illustrated by the violent entertainments of the Roman Empire (such as gladiatorial contests, public executions, and feeding Christians to lions) continues to be a sure crowd-pleaser to this day, as demonstrated by the widespread popularity of violent, erotic, and/or vulgar entertainment (can you spell Jackass?). The other side, which we can call “popular” in the etymological sense of being of the people, overlaps with what we now call “folk culture.” Quietly existing alongside high culture, folk culture expresses the experience and creativity of the masses in the form of ballads, agricultural festivals, fairy tales, feasts, folk art, folk music, and so on. Self-produced by amateur performers, folk culture is exemplified by neighbors gathering on a modest Appalachian front porch to play their guitars, banjos, dulcimers, zithers, mandolins, and fiddles to perform, for their own entertainment, ballads and songs passed down from generation to generation. Folk culture, of course, still exists. But for the past two hundred years, it has been dwindling, with increasing rapidity, as it becomes overwhelmed by a different kind of popular culture — a commercialized culture that, while still including elements of both the folk and the vulgar traditions, represents the outcome of a certain historical evolution. This culture, the popular culture that is most familiar today and that is the topic of this book, is a commercial, for-profit culture aimed at providing entertainment to a mass audience. Corporate rather than communal, it has transformed entertainment into a commodity to be marketed alongside all the other products in a consumer society. The forces that transformed the low culture of the past into contemporary popular culture arose during the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century and its accompanying urbanization of European and American society. In particular, four essentially interrelated forces — industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, and electronic technology — shaped the emergence of the mass cultural marketplace of entertainments that we know today. To see how this happened, let’s begin with the industrial revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, most Europeans and Americans lived in scattered agricultural settlements. While traveling entertainers in theatrical troupes and circuses might have visited the larger of these settlements, most people, especially those with little money, had little access to professional entertainment, and so had to produce their own. But with the industrial revolution, masses of people who had made their living through agriculture were compelled to leave their rural communities and move to the industrial towns and cities where employment was increasingly available. Populations began to concentrate in urban centers as the rural countryside emptied, leading to the development of mass societies. With the emergence of these mass societies came the development of mass culture. For just as mass societies are governed by centralized systems of governance (as the huge expanse of the United States is governed by a federal government concentrated in Washington, DC), so, too, are mass cultures entertained by culture industries concentrated in a few locations (as the film and TV industries are concentrated in Hollywood and its immediate environs). Thanks to the invention of such technologies as the cinema, the phonograph, and the radio at the end of the nineteenth century, and of television and digital technology in the mid- to late-twentieth century, the means to disseminate centrally produced mass entertainments to a mass society became possible. Thus, whether you live in Boston or Boise, New York or Nebraska, the entertainment you enjoy today is produced in the same few locations and is the same entertainment (TV programs, movies, DVDs, or Netflix series) no matter where you consume it. This growth of mass culture has been fundamentally shaped by the growth of America’s capitalist economic system, which has ensured that mass culture would develop as a for-profit industry. To get a better idea of how the whole process unfolded, let’s go back to that Appalachian front porch. Before electricity and urbanization, folks living in the backwoods of rural America needed to make their music themselves if they wanted it. They had no radios, phonographs, CD players, iPods, iPads, smartphones, or even electricity, and theaters with live performers were hard to get to and expensive. Under such conditions, the Appalachian region developed a vibrant folk music culture. But as people moved to cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit, where the steel and auto industries began to offer employment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the conditions under which neighbors could produce their own music decayed, for the communal conditions under which folk culture thrived were broken down by the mass migration to the cities. At the same time, the need to produce one’s own music declined as folks who had once plucked their own guitars and banjos could simply turn on their radios or purchase records to listen to professional musicians perform for them. Those musicians were contracted by recording companies that were in business to turn a profit, and their music, in turn, could be heard on the radio because corporate sponsors provided the advertising that made (and still makes) commercial radio broadcasting possible. Thus, the folk music of the American countryside became country music. An amalgamation of the traditional songs that a predominantly Scots-Irish immigrant population brought over from the British Isles with such American traditions as “white” gospel music, cowboy songs, and rock ’n’ roll, contemporary “country” preserves the rural working-class perspective of folk music even as it is performed by wealthy professionals. (Country music’s working-class roots explain why it is so often filled with the broken romances and broken-down cars of the poor.) So, the performance of folk music, once an amateur, do-it-yourself activity, became a professional, for-profit industry with passive consumers paying for their entertainment either by directly purchasing a commodity (for example, a CD or iTunes download) or by listening to the advertising that encourages them to purchase the products that sponsor their favorite radio programs. It’s still possible, of course, to make one’s own music, but most people find it easier and perhaps more aesthetically pleasing to listen to a professional recording. Today we are, in effect, constantly being trained to be the sort of passive consumers who keep the whole consumer-capitalist system going. Without that consumption, the economy might totally collapse. This is hardly an exaggeration, for postindustrial capitalism is making popular culture all the more dominant in our society with every passing year. With the American economy turning further away from industrial production and increasingly toward the production and consumption of entertainment (including sports), entertainment has been moving from the margins of our cultural consciousness — as mere play or recreation — to its center as a major buttress of our economy. A constant bombardment of advertising (which, after all, is the driving force behind the financing of digital media, just as it was for radio and television a generation or two ago) continually prods us to consume the entertainments that our economy produces. That bombardment has been so successful that our whole cultural consciousness is changing: We are becoming more concerned with play than with work, even while at work. (Tell the truth now: Do you ever tweet, or post something to Tumblr or Instagram, during class?) The result of the centuries-long process we have sketched above is the kind of culture we have today: an entertainment culture in which all aspects of society, including politics, and sometimes even the traditional elite arts, are linked by a common imperative to entertain. Indeed, as traditional high culture shrinks in social importance — having never had a mass audience to begin with and thus unable to compete effectively in a market economy — it has dwindled into becoming what might be called a “museum culture” (which is quietly marginalized and widely ignored). Popular culture has accordingly assumed its own “high” and “low” strata, with TV programs like Orange Is the New Black and Game of Thrones enjoying a kind of high cultural status, while Duck Dynasty profitably entertains at the low end. Pop Culture Goes to College Far from being a mere recreational frivolity, a leisure activity we could easily dispense with, the popular culture of today constitutes the essential texture of our everyday lives. From the way we entertain ourselves to the goods and services that we produce and consume, we are enveloped in a popular cultural environment that we can neither do without nor escape, even if we wanted to. To see this, just try to imagine a world without the Internet, TV, movies, sports, music, shopping malls, or advertising. The study of popular culture has accordingly taken a prominent place in American higher education — not least in American composition classrooms, which have taken the lead in incorporating popular culture into academic study, both because of the subject’s inherent interest value and because of its profound familiarity to most students. Your own expertise in popular culture means not only that you may know more about a given topic than your instructor, but that you can use that knowledge as a basis for learning the critical thinking and writing skills that your writing class is intended to teach you. Signs of Life in the U.S.A., then, is designed to let you exploit your knowledge of popular culture so that you may grow into a better writer, whatever the subject. You can interpret the popularity of a TV program like The Walking Dead, for example, in the same manner as you would interpret, say, a short story, because The Walking Dead, too, constitutes a kind of sign. A sign is something, anything, that carries a meaning. The familiar red sign at an intersection, for instance, means exactly what it says: “STOP.” But it also carries the implied message “or risk getting a ticket or into an accident.” Words, too, are signs: you read them to figure out what they mean. You were trained to read such signs, but that training began so long ago that you may well take your ability to read for granted. Nevertheless, all your life you have been encountering and interpreting other sorts of signs. Although you were never formally taught to read them, you know what they mean anyway. Take the way you wear your hair. When you get your hair cut, you are not simply removing hair; you are making a statement, sending a message about yourself. It’s the same for both men and women. Why was your hair short last year and long this year? Aren’t you saying something with the scissors? In this way, you make your hairstyle into a sign that sends a message about your identity. You are surrounded by such signs. Just look at your classmates. The world of signs could be called a kind of text, the text of America’s popular culture. We want you to think of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. as a window onto that text. What you read in this book’s essays and Chapter Introductions should lead you to study and analyze the world around you for yourself. Let the selections guide you to your own interpretations, your own readings, of the text of America. In this edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A., we have chosen seven “windows” that look out onto separate, but often interrelated, segments of the American scene. In each chapter, we have included essays that help you think about a specific topic in popular culture and guide you to locate and analyze related examples of your own. Each chapter also includes an Introduction written to alert you to the kinds of signs you will find there, along with model analyses and advice on how to go about interpreting the topic that the chapter raises. We have designed Signs of Life in the U.S.A. to reflect the many ways in which culture shapes our sense of reality and of ourselves, from the products we buy to the way culture, through such media as television and the movies, constructs our personal identities. This text thus introduces you to both the entertainment side and the ideological side of popular culture — and shows how the two sides are mutually dependent. Indeed, one of the major lessons you can learn from this book is how to find the ideological underpinnings of some of the most apparently innocent entertainments and consumer goods. Signs of Life in the U.S.A. accordingly begins with a chapter called “Consuming Passions.” Because America is a consumer culture, the environment in which the galaxy of popular signs functions is, more often than not, a consumerist one. This is true not only for obvious consumer products like clothes and cars but for traditionally nonconsumer items such as political candidates, who are often marketed like any other product. It is difficult to find anything in contemporary America that is not affected somehow by our consumerist ethos or by consumerism’s leading promoter, the advertiser. Thus, the second chapter, “Brought to You B(u)y,” explores the world of advertising, for advertising provides the grease, so to speak, that lubricates the engine of America’s consumer culture. Because television and film are the sources of many of our most significant cultural products, we include a chapter on each. Chapters on the digital cloud, personal identity, and the paradoxical contradictions that condition so much of American life round out our survey of everyday life. Throughout, the book invites you to go out and select your own “texts” for analysis (an advertisement, an app, a fashion fad, a TV show, and so on). Here’s where your own experience is particularly valuable, because it has made you familiar with many different kinds of popular signs and their backgrounds, as well as with the particular popular cultural system or environment to which they belong. The seven “windows” you will find in Signs of Life in the U.S.A. are all intended to reveal the common intersections of entertainment and ideology that exist in contemporary American life. Often what seems to be simply entertainment, like an action-adventure movie, can actually be quite political (consider the kerfuffle over Star Wars: Episode VII– The Force Awakens), while what is political can be cast as entertainment as well — as in House of Cards. The point is that little in American life is merely entertainment; indeed, just about everything we do has a meaning, often a profound one. The Semiotic Method To find this meaning, to interpret and write effectively about the signs of popular culture, you need a method, and part of the purpose of this book is to introduce such a method to you. Without a methodology for interpreting signs, writing about them could become little more than producing descriptive reviews or opinion pieces. Although nothing is wrong with writing descriptions and opinions, one of your goals in your writing class is to learn how to write academic essays — that is, analytical essays that present theses or arguments that are well supported by evidence. The method we use in this book — a method known as semiotics — is especially well suited for analyzing popular culture. Whether or not you’re familiar with this word, you already practice sophisticated semiotic analyses every day. Reading this page is an act of semiotic decoding (words and letters are signs that must be interpreted), but so is figuring out just what a friend means by wearing a particular shirt or dress. For a semiotician (one who practices semiotic analysis), a shirt, a haircut, a TV image, anything at all, can be taken as a sign, as a message to be decoded and analyzed to discover its meaning. Every cultural activity leaves a trace of meaning for semioticians, a kind of blip on the semiotic Richter scale for them to read and interpret, just as geologists “read” the earth for signs of earthquakes, volcanic activity, and other geological phenomena. Many who hear the word semiotics for the first time assume that it is the name of a new and forbidding subject. But in truth, the study of signs is neither new nor forbi ... Purchase answer to see full attachment