ReMix: Reading and Composing Culture [Paperback]

Catherine G. Latterell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 8, 2009 | ISBN-10: 031247668X | ISBN-13: 978-0312476687 | Edition: Second Edition

With a mix of humor and analysis, a collection of fresh readings, lively assignments, and an enticing design, ReMix is not your ordinary textbook. It asks students to re-examine everyday concepts (such as identity, entertainment, and technology); to question assumptions about everyday life and culture; and to respond critically and creatively to some of the most imaginative projects you’ll find in a composition reader.

Built on the idea that students live in a do-it-yourself world in which they are the writers, designers, and inventors, ReMix invites students to bring their own creativity into the composition classroom. It inspires them to ask: Why do I think the way I do? What is my relationship to the culture around me? Am I truly, as one advertisement claims, "my playlist"? This question-posing approach allows students to write about culture and identity in a meaningful way.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Catherine G. Latterell is associate professor of English at Penn State Altoona where she teaches first-year composition as well as a range of other rhetoric and writing courses. In addition to composition and cultural studies, her scholarly interests include post-critical pedagogy, literacy studies, and computers and composition. Her published essays consider the interstection of theory and practice in writing programs, writing centers, and composition classrooms.

Product Details

• Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's; Second Edition edition (July 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031247668X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312476687
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Encourages active learning; discourages passivity July 25, 2006

By Anonymous

Format:Paperback

I disagree with the previous reviewer that this text is "far to the left." The texts included for discussion are not to determine political viewpoints; they are to challenge accepted social assumptions. Overwhelmingly, the readings are politically neutral and target non-political subjects like trying to fit in in a high school, cheerleading, participating in college traditions, etc. Some texts may make politically-sensitive professors uncomfortable, but they are few and far between, and can easily be ignored (each section contains more essays than an instructor can reasonably cover). These texts, like John Stewart's graduation speech, are obviously included because they present an unusual viewpoint, or because they oppose or debunk a commonly held assumption. I think the previous reviewere missed the point and threw out the baby with the water. Latterell asks students to challenge and question the texts, not to blindly accept them as "truth."

For example, the John Stewart graduation speech takes humorous potshots at the declining state of education when Stewart states that if the college is honoring HIM then education is indeed in trouble. One would except a graduation speech to contain many references to the lofty ideals of education, but Stewart does nothing but point to his own shortcomings, thus casting doubts on the wisdom of academia for selecting him, of all people, as an exemplary alumn. Stewart being the raging liberal that he is cannot help but take at least one indirect poke at Bush, but this is not the focus of the essay and students are sophisticated enough readers that they can respond to Stewart's poking in kind, or ignore it without much scuffing.... Moreover, Latterell invites challenge with her questions: the essay is included for students to tear apart, analyze, and question, not to accept as Gospel. Perhaps Latterell might have included a few more essays that debunk commonly held assumptions from the conservative perspective, but the overwhelmingly obvious aim of the text is not to politicize or favor one view over the other as much as it is to encourage analysis and inquiry of even familiar and widely accepted assumptions, and this is obvious. Most of the essays included here are very good at what they do, and even the few that may be questionable are still good starting points for discussions. Most students love a controversy, after all. Freshmen are not mindless beings incapable of opinions.

What I like is that the text favors education as an active process of inquiry and investigation rather than a passive absorption of information. This is a very good thing. After almost 10 years of teaching freshmen comp I find one of the greatest challenges is to get students away from the "what do you want me to say/do?" mode that they acquired in high school to the "I can think for myself" attitudes I want to encourage in learned adults. This text helps.

Where the text really fails, unfortunately, is in a precise and student-friendly coaching of actual writing and rhetorical strategies. Her assignment suggestions, while interesting and innovative, presume a command of writing skills and analytical skills that freshmen students notoriously lack. There is little room in the text to allow for instructors to complement the missing information, too, since all the chapters and assignments, from the very first to the very last, demand that the students already be competent in their ability to describe, narrate, classify, define, analyze, organize and synthesize complex information.

Lattrell should have broken down her chapters not only by topics but also by rhetorical clusters that could be taught to the students in small, manageable sections. As the text stands, an instructor will have much to do in organizing herself and making sense on behalf of the students of all the complex information Latterell lumps together. An instructor taking the text at face value will have no fair standards by which to evaluate a student's essay, since it is unreasonable to expect a freshman student to be aware of the sophisticated stylistic and rhetorical devices Latterell takes for granted, and I can only imagine the disastrous results that these assignments would yield with well-meaning students fired up with ideas trying to make sense of all they want to say.

This is a good book, but you have to be prepared to work hard at selecting your readings, organizing your work, and supplementing Latterell's good ideas with plenty, plenty of your own material. This is why this book is a good idea, but not necessarily just yet an excellent text. Read more ›

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Culture Changes March 23, 2006

By Dinty W. Moore

Format:Paperback

A fascinating text with a smart premise: culture is mixing, remixing, and reinventing constantly. Lively readings. Students will respond well.

1.0 out of 5 stars Not the seller's fault June 5, 2013

By Brenna Murdock

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

If this book is required, the seller is reliable & the price is good, but if you have a choice, avoid it. The content is as outdated as the title should lead you to believe & is glaringly obvious with its pop culture references to relate to the kids (brittany spears glory days) Some of the readings are worthwhile, but as a whole it's a bit ridiculous

5.0 out of 5 stars Great March 5, 2013

By Tee B

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book was needed in a college education class. Buying the book here saved me quite a bit of money!

4.0 out of 5 stars Its A Textbook... January 31, 2013

By Andrew Budzinski

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

What can I saw, I had to buy it and have to read it. Its not the best book in the world, but its also not a terrible textbook. The articles in it are somewhat interesting, but not something I would recommend reading on your own. It was also nice that it wasn't HORRIBLY expensive.

5.0 out of 5 stars Satisfied Customer January 23, 2013

By Shelby Woodall

Format:Paperback

The book is in good condition and it came quickly. I am happy with the responsiveness as well. I would recommend this seller's products.

5.0 out of 5 stars A "soft introduction" to the art of Critical Thinking, or What? April 11, 2012

By Herbert L Calhoun

Format:Paperback

I am perfectly willing to admit that perhaps I have missed the whole point of this book? Initially, it appeared to me to be a "soft introduction" to critical thinking about culture, via textual artifacts extant within the culture, such as through literary and textual specimens, pictures, pop art, etc. Its methodology is set out clearly enough as "Socratic interrogation" of these items, using a heuristic framework curiously but carefully limited by the author to the following suite of variables: identity, community, tradition, romance, entertainment, nature and technology.

The shape of the dialog leaves the impression to the reader that these are the necessary and sufficient if not the "only" or "most" important things that define (and thus are needed to understand) American culture? They are laid out as if they were the "givens" of our culture. The book then proceeds to explicate our culture as it is seen through narratives shaped exclusively by (and as seen though) these cultural parameters. Arguably, this tells us what our culture is, but not where it comes from?

I admit that when it comes to formal structured thinking about culture, I have been self-taught. My eureka moment in this regard came while reading a book authored by the illustrative professor and public intellectual, Michael Eric Dyson. Dyson has his own heuristic formula for interrogating cultural texts (and artifacts). It is to ask the following questions: What is going on in the "context," the "subtext," and the "pretext," period: End of lesson, end of the Dyson heuristic.

So far, Dyson's Socratic method has yet to fail me, including (and especially) in analyzing this book.... Thus it is easy to see that my own self-taught art of cultural thinking has been forced upon me through the exigencies -- pressures and necessities of American social life and society. Foremost among these being the need to understand "how" and "why" American culture is organized the way it is. Without a heuristic scheme that allows one to ask and answer those two questions, arguably such a scheme is worse than useless.

The author's scheme here precludes the possibility of asking such questions? And while the parameters used may indeed convey "a certain kind of knowledge" about American culture, in my mind (and self-taught brain) the knowledge that one discovers in this way is not very useful in actually understanding how American culture itself is actually organized or how it works. This taxonomy simply does not allow the ability to answer the "how" and "why" questions.

To me, this is a very serious flaw. For this kind of knowledge essentially makes up a parallel universe of superficial and rather useless understanding that is about as meaningless to the actual understanding of how American society actually works or is actually structured, as do the pop artifacts themselves. For it is a fact that most of the understanding of American culture lies (to use Dyson's heuristic) not in the context (the artifacts and the way they are allowed to be manipulated), but in the subtext (the real reasons why America's hierarchical structured society exists in the first place) and in the pretext (the excuses and rationalizations for ignoring this hierarchy and the power that hold it together).

It is true as the author notes that Chris Rock and McDonald's Hamburgers are both artifacts of American culture. And while they both fit comfortably into this author's heuristic scheme, what this scheme conveys about them has absolutely nothing at all to do with the role either actually plays in American culture itself? To Wit: Chris Rock is a satirist whose main job is to critique the structure and especially the way American culture is organized hierarchically by its draconian racist rules. McDonald's, on the other hand, has become a symbol of American free enterprise, and to some a symbol of American mediocrity and cultural decadence, neither of which is conveyed in this author's scheme about either artifact.

As a minimum one needs a heuristic at least as potent as that of Dyson to get at the issues that underlie and actually drive American culture. Here is an alternative set of variables all of which are left out of this author's schemata: race, religion, violence, sex, economics, politics and war. Two stars Read more ›

4.0 out of 5 stars Creative textbook--Works best for English 101 January 22, 2012

By Lady McBain

Format:Paperback

I have used Remix twice in developmental English classes. The reader presents students with a series of cultural assumptions and texts that support or challenge them. Some of the readings were too challenging for developmental-level students, so several of our developmental faculty members created a custom reader called P/Remix for developmental-level. (Ask your book rep about creating a custom edition for your population.)
The text is engaging for younger students, but some of our older learners were nervous about the more intrusive activities (I don't use the assignment about showing the contents of the student's wallets!) and found the pop culture references off-putting. However, this can be dealt with by carefully choosing readings.