Biography of arthur asa berger cultural criticism

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Publishing Pop Culture was a matter of chance and good luck. One of my most successful books, Media Analysis Techniques, which I consider to be a postmodernist book, now in its third edition (it was published first in 1982), deals with four primary techniques of analyzing media, and by implication, anything. That call will probably be made by my publisher’s marketing director.

My sense of humor has also shielded me from some of the tribulations of academic life. I have a new book, in press, that takes the notion of dealing with important theorists to an extreme. “Birds of a feather flock together, and consume together.”

I also used Mary Douglas’ Grid-Group typology, which argues that there are four dominant lifestyles in the modern societies: Elitists, Individualists, Egalitarians and Fatalists.

in American Studies he said, “American Studies is a shmoo. If you bake it, you're a historian. A comic poem I wrote about these types is as follows:

Good at committees
For which he was cherished.
He never published,
And he never perished.

I have a cultural studies mystery about identity, Mistake in Identity, that was published in August of 2005, and I self-published (on www.lulu.com) two other mysteries, The Rashomon Case, which is about different interpretations of the film, and Terminal Papers, a detective story that teaches how to write compositions.

Some would say all of my books are really about myself, and all of them should be considered fiction. An Italian professor said that my book Media Analysis Techniques, published in an Italian translation, might be suitable for high school students. In the book, I analyze everything from clock radios and king-sized beds to electric toothbrushes and trash compactors.

I once suggested, in a grad seminar at the University of Minnesota, that studying advertisements was worth doing but was shouted down by my classmates and the professor, who informed me that advertisements were trivial, bastard works of art. In any case, while I was waiting for the reviews to come in, with nothing else to do, I decided to write a book on consumption.

I am a cartoonist and illustrator and did drawings for The Journal of Communication for a dozen years. And, what’s better, they can get students. My spoof of this idea, in my “Lamentation for a Dead American Studies Scholar,” is as follows:

A mind
Wide ranging, and judicial
He skimmed the surface
Of the superficial.

As a result of this inferiority complex, professors with American Studies backgrounds tended to search for deadly “serious” subjects and wrote dreary and overly researched essays on matters of relatively little significance.

Saussure had defined concepts negatively, saying their meaning comes from their place in a system and most precisely in being what others are not. It is my destiny, I recognize, to write slender volumes, so even though I’ve published sixty books, I think I only have 8,000 to 10,000 pages in print from my books.

I also edited a reader on what might be described as popular anthropology, About Man, for Pflaum. That event, I realize now, was a sign from the gods that my relationship with academia would be essentially a comedic one. I would like to call it CommTEXTS but what it will end up being called is hard to say. I had a devil of a time getting it published.

In it, he discusses wrestling, soap powders, margarine, and all kinds of other seemingly trivial phenomena that have, he suggests, a mythic content.