Sign of Life Assignment | Get Paper Help

1. From your SL book, select two essays from Chapter 4 (“The Hollywood Sign”). For your two selected essays, write an 8-sentence summary for each with at least 2 cited quotes for each. Be sure the essay “Title,” author, and thesis are in the first sentence

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

Preface for Instructors
A funny thing happened on the way to the ninth edition of Signs of Life in
the U.S.A.: Donald Trump — contrary to all of the projections that the latest
in predictions markets technology could muster — was elected president of
the United States. This gave us pause: not because we had any intention of
turning our book into some sort of “Trump Reader,” but because the election
at once both verifies the fundamental premises of earlier editions of Signs of
Life and promises to affect American culture in ways that it behooves the
current edition to anticipate and address. And that is what we have strived to
do, in as nonpartisan a manner as we can.
There are two basic ways in which the presidential election of Donald
Trump bears out the guiding principles of this book. First, it exemplifies, in a
particularly striking manner, the preeminent place of popular culture in
contemporary American life. For Trump’s road to the White House was
paved in large part both by his success as a reality TV star and by his noholds-
barred employment of Twitter as a means to communicate with his
followers. Not even the election of Ronald Reagan (himself a former
entertainment figure) can really compare in this regard, because Reagan had
spent years in the political arena — most notably as governor of California —
before he went to Pennsylvania Avenue, and candidate Reagan had no social
media available to maintain a 24/7 connection with voters. So 2016 really
was different, reflecting the full coming of age of the power of pop culture.
But there is a second way in which the Trump presidency reflects what
earlier editions of Signs of Life presumed and explored: the ever-growing
ideological divide between two Americas — often called red state and blue
state — is a theme that this book formally addressed in chapters devoted to
the fundamental contradictions that have riven this nation from its inception.
And if anyone has doubted the existence of this division, or felt that it was
only a sideshow to a basically unified country, the Trump election, and more
importantly its aftermath, loudly says otherwise. Americans have really seen
nothing quite like this since the Civil War.
So, putting aside our own opinions about what could be called the
“Election Heard Round the World,” we have created this new edition of our
book with our foundational assumptions not only strengthened but
intensified: that American popular culture, no longer a mere cultural
embellishment or ornament, now permeates almost everything we do, even as
it reflects back to us what we are becoming as a society and who we are.
Thus, if we wish to understand America today, we must learn to think
critically about the vast panoply of entertainments and commodities that were
once condescendingly dismissed as elements of “mass culture.” And that is
what Signs of Life in the U.S.A. has always been designed to teach your
students to do.
Then and Now
The importance of thinking critically about popular culture has not always
been apparent in the academic world. When the first edition of Signs of Life
appeared, the study of popular culture was still embroiled in the “culture
wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a struggle for academic legitimacy in
which the adherents of popular cultural studies prevailed so thoroughly that it
now seems surprising that anyone ever objected to it at all. For today, the
importance of understanding what Michel de Certeau has called “the practice
of everyday life,” and the value of using popular culture as a thematic ground
for educating students in critical thinking and writing, is now taken for
granted, as what was once excluded from academic study on the basis of a
naturalized distinction between “high” and “low” culture is now an accepted
part of the curriculum, widely studied in freshman composition classrooms as
well as in upper-division undergraduate courses and graduate seminars.
But recognition of the importance that popular culture has assumed in our
society has not been restricted to the academy. Increasingly, Americans are
realizing that American culture and popular culture are virtually one and the
same, and that whether we are looking at our political system, our economy,
or simply our national consciousness, the power of popular culture to shape
our lives is strikingly apparent. That’s why, unlike most other popular culture
texts, Signs of Life adopts an interpretive approach — semiotics — explicitly
designed to analyze that intersection of ideology and entertainment that we
call popular culture. We continue to make semiotics the guiding
methodology behind Signs of Life because semiotics helps us, and our
students, avoid the common pitfalls of an uncritical celebration of popular
culture, or simple trivia swapping.
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