In this era, jingles, slogans, and celebrities have replaced nursery rhymes, storybook characters and fairly tales of childhood imaginaries of previous generations. After this course, you will perhaps never look at a commercial, a print ad, a billboard, a perfume box, or other semiotics of everyday living in the same way again. This course will challenge your analytical skills and inform the way you perceive your place in the world. We will perform in-depth analyses of the varying rhetorics (visual, verbal, and written) set forth by the media and popular culture. The overall goal of the course will be to develop our skills as writers, to engage with texts and ideas through the writing process and to articulate, in writing, analyses of our individual understanding of our role in consumerism and our intricate relationship with materialism and technology. During this entire journey, we will improve writing, research, and critical thinking skills. Students will be required to write 3 papers with secondary sources, keep a critical reading journal, and write and present a final written project that will be an investigative analysis. Questions we will pose will include, why are we addicted to shopping and "stuff?" What is a consumer identity and how is it constructed? Why is it so difficult to discern the difference between wants and needs? How can we learn to think critically about the rhetorics of need and lack presented by the media? Why do we look to the media as a major resource of information for food, health, nutrition, values, and behavior?

Required texts: The Consumer Society Reader by Juliet Schor; Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John De Graaf and readings on e-reserves.