Wherever we look today, popular culture greets us with “texts” that make implicit arguments; this book helps students to think and write critically about these texts. The World Is a Text teaches critical reading, writing, and argument in the context of pop-culture and visual examples, showing students how to “read” everyday objects and visual texts with basic semiotics. The book shows how texts of all kinds, from a painting to a university building to a pair of sneakers, make complex arguments through their use of signs and symbols, and shows students how to make these arguments in their own essays. This new edition is rich with images, real-world examples, writing and discussion prompts, and examples of academic and student writing. The first part of the book is a rhetoric covering argumentation, research, the writing process, and adapting from high-school to college writing, while the second part explores writing about specific cultural topics. Notes, instruction, and advice about research are woven into the text, with research instruction closely tied to the topic being discussed. New to the updated compact edition are chapters on fashion, sports, and nature and the environment.

Said demonstrates that critical discourse has been strengthened by the writings of Derrida and Foucault and by influences like Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. But, he argues, these forces have compelled literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.

Advances critical conversations in Native American literary studies by situating its subject in global, transnational, and modernizing contexts. Since the rise of the Native American Renaissance in literature and culture during the American civil rights period, a rich critical discourse has been developed to provide a range of interpretive frameworks for the study, recovery, and teaching of Native American literary and cultural production. For the past few decades the dominant framework has been nationalism, a critical perspective placing emphasis on specific tribal nations and nationalist concepts. While this nationalist intervention has produced important insights and questions regarding Native American literature, culture, and politics it has not always attended to the important fact that Native texts and writers have also always been globalized. The World, the Text, and the Indian breaks from this framework by examining Native American literature not for its tribal-national significance but rather its connections to global, transnational, and cosmopolitan forces. Essays by leading scholars in the field assume that Native American literary and cultural production is global in character; even claims to sovereignty and self-determination are made in global contexts and influenced by global forces. Spanning from the nineteenth century to the present day, these analyses of theories, texts, and methods—from trans-indigenous to cosmopolitan, George Copway to Sherman Alexie, and indigenous feminism to book history—interrogate the dialects of global indigeneity and settler colonialism in literary and visual culture.

By intelligence officials for intelligent people

An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.

This popular, culture-oriented book is devoted to teaching its readers how to read all kinds of texts. Its comprehensive and inclusive approach focuses on the relationship between absorbing traditional workssuch.