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A Dialectic With the Everyday: Communication and Cultural Politics on Oprah Winfrey's Book Club

This essay explores the cultural politics of television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. Because women constitute both the primary Oprah television audience and the largest United States book buying public, it focuses specifically on women's involvement in the club and their modes of engagement with its selections. The Book Club's astonishing success was attributable in part to the carefully considered communication strategies through which participants, Winfrey, and Oprah producers collectively articulated the value of books and reading specifically for women. Their de-emphasizing of purely literary considerations, I contend, enabled women to strategize how to use Book Club selections simultaneously to distance themselves from and to engage more intensively with the demands of living in a patriarchal and otherwise socioeconomically stratified society – a relationship I call a “dialectic with the everyday.” This essay thus traces the communicative processes/practices through which those involved in Oprah's Book Club articulated a highly sophisticated economy of cultural value around books and reading and the implications of that economy to a possible feminist cultural politics.