Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers

Signs of Life in the USA teaches students to read and write critically about popular culture by giving them a conceptual framework to do it: semiotics, a field of critical theory developed specifically for the interpretation of culture and its signs. Written by a prominent semiotician and an experienced writing instructor, the text’s high-interest themes feature provocative and current reading selections that ask students to think analytically about America’s impressive popular culture: How is TV’s Mad Men a lightning rod for America’s polarized political climate? Has the nature of personal identity changed in an era when we spend so much of our lives online? Signs of Life bridges the transition to college writing by providing students with academic language to talk about our common, everyday cultural experience. Read the preface. Order Multimodal Readings for Signs of Life in the USA packaged with Signs of Life in the USA, Seventh Edition using ISBN-13: 978-1-4576-1989-2.

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)."