The World is a Text: Writing, Reading and Thinking About Visual and Popular Culture

by Jonathan Silverman, Dean Rader

The book teaches readers the usefulness of learning to actively "read" their surroundings. The new edition features a greatly expanded section on writing, editing, and making arguments. This cultural studies reader directly engages the process of reading and writing about the “texts” one sees in everyday life. Using the lenses of rhetoric, semiotics and cultural studies, students are encouraged to become effective academic writers while gaining deeper insights into such popular culture categories as movies, technology, race, ethnicity, television, media, relationships, public space, and more. For anyone who enjoys provocative and engaging material, and is interested in developing an appreciation for diverse cultural literary works.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Reference, Textbooks, Academic, Cultural, Writing

768 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 2002

About the author

Jonathan Silverman is a professor of English at UMass Lowell. He is the editor of Astros and Asterisks: The Houston Sign-Stealing Scandal, Explained.

He is the co-author with Michael Hinds of Johnny Cash International: How and Why the World Loves the Man in Black (University of Iowa Press, 2020), which is the winner of the 2023 Peggy O'Brien Book Prize.

He is also author of Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); the co-author with Dean Rader of The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Culture and Its Contexts (Pearson/Broadview, 2002-2018, five editions); and the co-editor with Meghan Sweeney of Remaking the American College Campus (McFarland, 2016).

He has served as the Fulbright Roving Scholar in Norway (2007-2008) and was a John H. Daniels fellow at the National Sporting Library (2013-2014).
He has published articles on horse racing in The Cambridge Companion to Horseracing, The Journal of Sport History, Poor Yorick, Post, and The End of Austin as part of a larger work on horse racing in progress. He has published work in Prospects, Kugelmass, The Rumpus, The Journal of the American West, and The Journal of Radicalism, and wrote for PBS’s website, Remotely Connected.

Reviews

[Valleri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting, relevant textbook that I actually enjoyed reading.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a textbook, I find the second half, which is dedicated to breaking down specific types of cultural analysis, far more used to rhetoric and composition instructors than the first. I feel that the book is easily accessible, although the pop culture references do skew more towards a white Western audience, and circumvents the kind of dense prose that can make textbooks so alienating to college students. The first section though, in this current edition, contains some questionable terminology, misinformation, and somewhat prescriptive writing pedagogy that could dissuade rhetoric and composition instructors from utilizing the book in their classes.

[Gwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My essay "'La Femme Veronica': Intelligence as Power in Veronica Mars" is in here!

[Krystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book, a must read for anyone interested in pop culture!

[Colin Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to understanding images from a cultural studies perspective; however, it would work better with images as exemplary throughout the text.

[Sss Book]

7 of 7

[Melissa Nestico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for my English class and it was fun to read all the different essays that are in here.