USA Pop

Arthur Asa Berger

Sept 2020 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this eBook

This book, written in an accessible style and illustrated with drawings by the author and numerous photographs, uses semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, and other cultural studies disciplines to analyze pop culture and everyday life in America. Each chapter contains numerous quotations of interest from writers and thinkers of all kinds, giving the book a documentary quality. Among the topics discussed are the social, psychological, and cultural significance of blue jeans, women’s handbags, hairstyles, hip hop fashion, nudism, wrestling, Donald Duck, and many other aspects of popular culture and everyday life in America. The book will be of use as a secondary text for courses in pop culture, cultural studies, fashion studies, American culture and society, material culture, and, since it is written in a lively and entertaining style, for the general reader.

About the author

Arthur Asa Berger is Professor Emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts at San Francisco State University. He wrote his PhD dissertation on the comic strip Li’l Abner, and is the author of more than 100 articles and 80 books on popular culture, media studies, semiotics, humor, consumer culture, and tourism. His recent publications include Perspectives on Everyday Life: A Cross Disciplinary Analysis (2018), Shopper’s Paradise: /Retail Stores and American Consumer Culture (2019), and Humor, Psyche and Society: A Socio-Semiotic Analysis (2020). His books have been translated into nine languages and he has lectured at more than 20 universities, including institutions in Iran, China, Vietnam, Italy, Germany, Argentina, and Brazil. He was a Fulbright scholar in Italy in 1963-64 and was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Germany, Belarus, and Argentina in recent years.