Pop Culture for Beginners promotes reflective engagement with the world around us and provides tools for thinking critically about how meaning is created, reinforced, and circulated. Privileging a semiotic approach, the book's first part, "The Pop Culture Toolbox," outlines the development of pop culture studies; explains the semiotic framework; introduces students to a variety of critical lenses including Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and Critical Race Theory; and then offers an overview of pop culture "pivot points," including authenticity, intersectionality, intertextuality, and subculture. The book's second part provides a series of units, prepared in consultation with subject area experts, built around topics central to popular culture studies: television and film, music, comics, gaming, social media, and fandom.

Each chapter includes "Your Turn" activities and discussion questions, as well as possible assignments and suggestions for further reading. The chapters in part two also include questions as beginning points for thinking critically and readings demonstrating relevant scholarly approaches to popular culture. Important vocabulary terms are included in a substantive glossary at the end.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University, an Associate Editor for The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and the host of the long-running internet goth/industrial radio broadcast, DJ cypher's Dark Nation Radio. He is the author or editor of 25 books on questionable topics ranging from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Edgar Allan Poe. These include The Mad Scientist's Guide to Composition (Broadview), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press), And Now For Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python (with Kate Egan, Manchester UP), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Wallflower Press), Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (with Regina Hansen, Fordham UP), The Age of Lovecraft (with Carl Sederholm, Minnesota), Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture (with Isabella van Elferen, Routledge), The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (Ashgate), and The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (Wallflower). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.