Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture

Front Cover
Columbia University Press, Nov 5, 2003 - Performing Arts - 352 pages

Oprah Winfrey is the protagonist of the story to be told here, but this book has broader intentions, begins Eva Illouz in this original examination of how and why this talk show host has become a pervasive symbol in American culture. Unlike studies of talk shows that decry debased cultural standards and impoverished political consciousness, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery asks us to rethink our perceptions of culture in general and popular culture in particular.

At a time when crises of morality, beliefs, value systems, and personal worth dominate both public and private spheres, Oprah's emergence as a cultural form—the Oprah persona—becomes clearer, as she successfully reiterates some of our most pressing moral questions. Drawing on nearly one hundred show transcripts; a year and a half of watching the show regularly; and analysis of magazine articles, several biographies, O Magazine, Oprah Book Club novels, self-help manuals promoted on the show, and hundreds of discussions on the Oprah Winfrey Web site, Illouz takes the Oprah industry seriously, revealing it to be a multilayered "textual structure" that initiates, stages, and performs narratives of suffering and self-improvement that resonate with a wide audience and challenge traditional models of cultural analysis. This book looks closely at Oprah's method and her message, and in the process reconsiders popular culture and the tools we use to understand it.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Acknowledgments
Oprah Winfrey and the Study of Culture
The Oprah Winfrey Show as a New Cultural Genre
The Hypertext of Identity
Suffering and SelfHelp as Global Forms of Identity
The Sources and Resources of The Oprah Winfrey Show
Toward an Impure Critique of Popular Culture
Ordinary People Extraordinary Television
Notes
Subject Index
Name Index
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture
Eva Illouz
Limited preview - 2003
Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture
Eva Illouz
Limited preview - 2003
Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture
Eva Illouz
No preview available - 2003

Common terms and phrases

African American culture analysis argue audience become black women Book Club Cambridge chapter characterized claim Club novels compassion contemporary critical critique cultural enterprise cultural form discourse Donahue emotional ethical ethos everyday example experience fact feminist forms of suffering frame genre global guests habitus healing Ibid identity individual institutions intentions interpretation Kleinman late modernity lives Magazine Martha Nussbaum meaning middle-class moral mother norms novels offers one’s Oprah Winfrey Show Oprah's Book Club ordinary pain particular Patricia Hill Collins person Phil Donahue Show Phil McGraw political popular culture postmodern problem psychic psychological public sphere Radway readers relationship role self-help selfhood sense sexual abuse simultaneously social society Sociology speech spiritual story strategies structure suggests symbolic talk shows television therapeutic narrative Toni Morrison traditional Transcript transformed turn understanding University Press victims viewers voyeurism White Oleander Winfrey's woman York

About the author (2003)

Eva Illouz is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (University of California Press) and The Culture of Capitalism (in Hebrew).

Bibliographic information

TitleOprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture
AuthorEva Illouz
PublisherColumbia University Press, 2003
ISBN0231508972, 9780231508971
Length352 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Performing Arts / Television / History & Criticism
Social Science / Media Studies
Social Science / Popular Culture
  
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