ENG 4934 Gaines Spring 2021

Oprah loves books—and she has made America love them too. Since 1996, Oprah Winfrey has shaped America’s literary taste with the selections made for her hugely successful “Oprah’s Book Club.” With her stamp of approval, writers like Toni Morrison and Edwidge Danticat find new and eager audiences, publishing industries change their marketing strategies, and Jonathan Franzen and James Frey apologize. In this interdisciplinary course, we will read Nobel Prize winners, memoirs that made it to the big screen, and one of the club’s latest picks. We will also consider secondary sources that help us understand the historical phenomenon of the American book club, discourses of what constitutes “high” and “low” art (and why that distinction exists or even matters), and what “book club scandals” can teach us about reading.