The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking About Culture and its Contexts

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!!!
Review: This is an excellent book!!! This book provides an intelligent, engaging and enjoyable perspective of reading, writing and understanding literature. What makes this book captivating is the personal tone of the book, it really has a unique approach to teaching literature and it's very lively copy. Captivating literature choices!!! I really enjoy this book, it not only teaches about literature, it also touches on the life around us and how we interact with that world. This book comes in handy for any stage of your writing and it is an enjoyable read. Intelligent writers, whose strongest asset is their own fresh thoughts they share with the reader!!! Highly recommend this book!!

Rating:
Summary: Approach and Selections Make this a Winner
Review: Using poetry, fiction, photos, and essays, the book offers a colorful tour of the subtle and not-so-subtle influences Americans deal with every day, and it guides the reader through the process of 'reading' these 'texts' that make up our world. The texts include not just the written variety but also television, movies, popular music, and public space.
The readings include essays on 'Seinfeld,' 'The Simpsons,' and the Rosie O'Donnell show, in addition to choice works by Neruda, Langston Hughes, Chris Haven, Kate Chopin, and many others. I haven't found a dry one in bunch, honestly, though at first glance I was afraid the section on public space would be a snooze. Not so! It's actually pretty thought-provoking.
The book's pedagogical emphasis is on getting readers to find and analyze the subtexts that run through cultural influences of all kinds and to explore their reactions through writing. I think this aspect of the book is very well done and would be effective in getting students to think critically about the world.

The strange and beautiful (not to mention utterly surprising) thing about this work is that it makes for consistently fascinating reading despite its status as a composition/cultural studies text. I've been leafing through the selections for pleasure reading, and from that perspective, it's an uncommonly tasty collection.

As a reader for a class, I think this book would be tremendously effective, and were I to teach a composition or cultural studies class, it would be my first choice.