ABSTRACT
This chapter continues to use critical cultural studies, including Gramsci's anchoring concepts, to explore links between reading and popular culture, consumerist ideology, and adult learning. It presents the examples of how a holistic form of incidental learning, which combines emotion, spirituality, and intellect, might occur in daily activities such as reading or shopping. More than an intellectual process, Becky's learning involves an emotional investment in the construction of her identity as it is realized through shopping and consumption. Shopping in a fashionable city's fashionable stores gives Becky what really matters for a woman: an enviable sense of style and an appropriately self-deprecating manner. The chapter analyses formal adult education purposes, such as the critical consumer education discussed by Sandlin. Sandlin refers to as traditional consumer education is aimed at shoppers such as Becky people who understand the emotional and cultural appeal of shopping and need to learn the art of self-restraint. Fictional texts are evidence of cultural and social reality.
