The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control by Ted Striphas

Author:Ted Striphas
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science/Popular Culture
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2011-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

“No Dictionary Required”

As popular as the book club may be, it nonetheless worries some commentators who fear its success will tarnish the standards by which books are judged. A 2001 piece by Cynthia Crossen published in the Wall Street Journal exemplifies these anxieties. Crossen asserts that “no dictionary is required for most” Oprah’s Book Club selections, “nor is an appreciation for ambiguity or abstract ideas. The biggest literacy challenge of some Oprah books is their length.”25 Crossen took Winfrey, the primary spokes-person for the club, to task for failing to challenge readers with the literariness of book club selections or, alternatively, for failing to challenge readers with titles sufficiently literary at all. What Crossen failed to acknowledge, however, is that the success of Oprah’s Book Club is built on both Winfrey and the book club’s participants intentionally sidestepping discussions of “abstract ideas” and purely aesthetic concerns in favor of articulating a fundamentally different economy of bibliographic value.

The televised book club discussions have admittedly tended to shy away from even the most basic vocabulary of literary criticism (e.g., allusion, imagery, metaphor, symbolism, tone), a trend that continued with the club’s return in 2003 and its brief shift to “classic” literary works. Crossen was right in pointing out that page length has been a far more important criterion for making book club selections than, say, a given book’s literary qualities. In fact, almost every on-air announcement of new Oprah’s Book Club selections has included at least some mention of the book’s length. Rather than dismissing a preoccupation with length outright or seeing it as a sign of amateurishness, it might be more constructive to examine why it’s played such a crucial role in the book club’s selection process.

When Winfrey announced the selection of Barbara Kingsolver’s Poison-wood Bible in June 2000, just prior to the summer recess of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she described it as “a walapalooza of a book.” “It’s 500 and some pages,” Winfrey continued. “Actually, it’s—yeah, 546, 546, which is wonderful for the summer, because I didn’t want you to, like, just breeze through it and then have to complain to me because you didn’t have enough to read.” Winfrey then went on to admonish her audience to “take your time with it. Read one of the … chapters, come back, let that settle in with yourself, come back and read another chapter.”26 She concluded the day’s broadcast by reiterating that The Poisonwood Bible was a “great, great, great book for the summer, 546 pages.”27

Winfrey has framed other selections almost identically. At the beginning of a broadcast in June 1997 she stated: “Today we’re announcing a big—I mean B-I-G book.”28 Later, when she revealed the selection, she explained: “I knew back last year when we first started this book club that this was the book that you should be reading for the summer, because it is 740 pages long. Now for a lot of you, that’s—that’ll be you first time with a book that big—a big accomplishment, OK? So

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.