ASRC 4517 - [Oprah Book Club and African American Literature]

(crosslisted) AMST 4517

Fall. Next offered 2016-2017. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with AMST 6517/ASRC 6517/ENGL 6740.

R. Richardson.

The Oprah Winfrey Show, a hallmark of daytime and talk show television for 25 years, reached a milestone in its production when it introduced the Oprah Book Club in 1996, whose three periods of development have mirrored the various phases that can be identified in the production of the show itself. The internationally known Oprah Book Club has an undeniably transformative impact on the publishing industry and has also increasingly emerged as a topic of interest in academia, as evidenced by the growing number of scholarly publications devoted to this topic. In addition to its impact on fiction and non-fiction authors in national and international contexts, the Oprah Book club has strongly impacted African American literature in the course of its long history by highlighting a range of African American authors. Significantly, four works by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison alone have been featured on the Oprah Book Club over the years. This course will examine the work of some of the African American and African diasporan authors who have been featured on the show, including Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Lalita Tadema, Ernest J. Gaines, Maya Angelou, Sidney Poitier, and Pearl Cleage, along with Oprah’s endorsements of newer writers such as Janet Mock, Cynthia Bond and Steve Harvey, and draw on a range of critical and theoretical resources related to the Oprah Book Club archive, including its pedagogical outreach through technologies such as the internet, to discuss the impact of the Oprah Book Club on the genre of African American literature.