The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club
I read The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, I found myself disagreeing vigorously with many of the authors in this collection. I frequently caught myself talking to the text, articulating responses to points of view with which I took issue. This not only had the effect of keeping me reading, but it also Tag Heuer Replica made me feel very much as though I was participating in a discussion about Oprah’s Book Club rather than reading a series of lectures on the topic. That I found myself so engaged with the material suggested to me that these essays might find a useful place in my syllabus as a way to illuminate cultural literacy practices that my students often struggle to see.
There can be no question that Oprah Winfrey’s televised book club has changed the nature of the conversation around literacy, reading, and popular culture. Although the club began in 1997, only recently has the academic community begun to consider the nature and consequences of the book club in a nuanced and critical way. In The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, editors Cecelia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker collected and organized some of the widely disparate thinking about Oprah’s Book Club, its rules, and its implications. As Konchar Farr and Harker argue in the Introduction to these essays, a consideration of Oprah’s Book Club is first a consideration of the affect that Oprah brings to bear upon her particular instantiation of reading. This collection of essays considers both the nature of the club, which privileges affect in the reading experience and the role that such privileging plays in mediating the discussion of the text. The essays explore Oprah’s Book Club as a national and international phenomenon and its position at the nexus of literary and digital media, colloquial and academic reading, and public and private narrative. With limited space, I will not consider each chapter in this collection separately. Rather, I will focus my attention on the themes I consider to have the most potential for educators.
One of the primary tasks of many of the authors is to unpack the literacy practices of the book club itself. Kathryn Lofton (“Reading Religiously”), Yung-Hsing Wu (“The Romance of Reading Like Oprah”), and Kelley Penfield Lewis (“The Trouble with Happy Endings”) unpack the Oprah Affect itself. These authors Fake Watches describe the literacy practices that circumscribe the reading and talk of Oprah’s Book Club. To do so, they examine what it means to read “like Oprah,” the explicit and implicit rules for club participation, and Oprah’s own narrative backdrop to the club—the beliefs about the world that undergird book selections and frame discussion.
These authors describe the discursive practices and authoritative ways of reading that Oprah endorses, models, and expects during the meetings. The authors’ clear analyses of Oprah’s Book Club, combined with the public accessibility of the club, provide valuable examples of how literacy practices are shaped and the consequences of those practices for members, viewers, and anyone with a stake in literacy. Educators seeking ways to teach the notion of reading as a social practice, circumscribed and directed by rules that affect the textual transaction and the social interaction around the text will find these chapters especially valuable.
This examination of Oprah literacies sets the stage for consideration of the implications of these practices in terms of broader subject positions, the most common of which is social class. Several authors devote their chapters to the consideration of Oprah’s Book Club as a mediator of social class and reading, a lightning rod for criticisms of middlebrow reading practices, and a champion of reading that embraces the everyday reader.
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