ReMix: Reading and Composing Culture

With a mix of humor and analysis, a collection of fresh readings, lively assignments, and an enticing design, ReMix is not your ordinary textbook. It asks students to re-examine everyday concepts (such as identity, entertainment, and technology); to question assumptions about everyday life and culture; and to respond critically and creatively to some of the most imaginative projects you’ll find in a composition reader.

Built on the idea that students live in a do-it-yourself world in which they are the writers, designers, and inventors, ReMix invites students to bring their own creativity into the composition classroom. It inspires them to ask: Why do I think the way I do? What is my relationship to the culture around me? Am I truly, as one advertisement claims, "my playlist"? This question-posing approach allows students to write about culture and identity in a meaningful way.

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Acting Out Culture: Reading and Writing

Students are bombarded every day with media messages laden with rules: how true patriots should act, how healthy people eat, what real women should look like. Acting Out Culture is the first thematic composition reader to focus students' attention beyond what rules and norms govern their everyday behavior to how the rules themselves have been shaped over time. The author, James Miller, has drawn on his cutting-edge expertise in cultural analysis to help students inquire into those social norms and respond with writing that positions them as citizens making informed decisions about their world.

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Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers

The best-selling composition reader on popular culture, Signs of Life in the USA has been adopted at more than 700 colleges and universities since its first edition. Unlike other popular culture readers, Signs of Life presumes that this topic merits rigorous analysis and so provides a conceptual framework for understanding it: semiotics, a field of critical theory developed specifically for the interpretation of culture and its signs. The selections in Signs of Life are arranged in provocative chapters (on such themes as gender codes, television and music, film, and advertising) that tap into students' own experiences with and interest in popular culture. The uniquely qualified editorial team of a prominent semiotician and an experienced writing instructor have prepared extensive apparatus to prompt the rigorous analysis that help students become better thinkers and writers.

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