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.     

Mass Communications

Ted Perry (ed.) Performing Arts Resources: 1974 (New York: Drama Books Specialists/Theater Library Association, 1974—price not known)

George N. Gordon's Communications and Media: Constructing a Cross-Discipline (New York: Hastings House, 1975—$12.50/6.95)

Francisco J. Lewels Jr.'s The Uses of the Media by the Chicano Movement: A Study in Minority Access (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1974— $15.00)

Lester Asheim and Sara I. Fenwick's Differentiating the Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975—$5.95)

C.A. Schicke's Revolution in Sound: A Biography of the Recording Industry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974—$6.95)

T. Jan Wiseman and Molly J. Wiseman's Creative Communicati Teaching Mass Media (Minneapolis: National Scholastic Press Association at the University of Minnesota, 1974—price not given, paper)     

Radio and Television

Ralph M. Jennings and Pamela Richard's How to Protect Your Rights in Television and Radio (Office of Communication, United Church of Christ, 289 Park Ave. South, New York 10010—price not given, paper)

Ted C. Smythe and George A. Mastroianni's Issues in Broadcasting: Radio, Television, and Cable (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1975—price not given but around $7.00 we learned from editors, paper)

James D. Secrest's Electronic Industries Association: The First 50 Years (Washington: EIA, 1974—price not given)

Ann M. Velia's KOB: Goddard's Magic Mast, Fifty Years of Pioneer Broadcasting (Las Cruces, N.M.: New Mexico State University Press, 1972—$6.95)

Harold Niven's Broadcast Education 1975: 14th Report (Washington: National Association of Broadcasters, 1975—$5.00, paper)

Broadcast Programming and Production (bimonthly/$7.00 per year, with first three issues free on request)

Joel L. Efrein, Cablecasting Production Handbook (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB Books, 1975—$12.95)

NCTA is Over the Cable (Washington: National Cable Television Association, 1975—free on request, paper)

Community Antenna Television Journal (4209 N.W. 23rd St., Suite 106, Oklahoma City 73107)     

Keyword: Critical

This essay considers what the term “critical” means—or could mean—to critical/cultural studies scholars. It does so by engaging with two key texts from the history of cultural studies: Raymond Williams'     

Reviews

Books reviewed
Ronald Barnett (2003) Beyond All Reason: Living with Ideology in the University . Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. 231 pp; ISBN 0-335-20894-0 (hb.) £65; 0-335-20893-2 (pb.) £22.50.
Cecile Deer (2002) Higher Education in England and France Since the 1980s . Oxford: Symposium Books. 208 pp; ISBN 1-873927-64-9. £24.00 (pb).     

Interpreting the Process of Change in Higher Education: The Case of the Research Assessment Exercises

Given that the current Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2001) has been completed, it is an appropriate time to explore the impact of the RAEs upon the character of British higher education. This timeliness is reinforced by the earlier publication of HEFCE's own ‘Review of Research’ (September 2000), the report from the House of Commons’ Select Committee on Science and Technology Committee (April 2000), with a report due in April 2003 from the Joint Funding Bodies (under the auspices of Gareth Roberts). We are therefore in a period of review and consultation, which may culminate in a new assessment regime or, as its severest critics would hope, even its demise. While our analysis genuflects to these contemporary developments, it is constructed within a framework that interprets the RAE process as constituting a continuous struggle for the control of the production of high‐status knowledge.     

Undergraduates' attitudes and beliefs about subject matter and pedagogy measured periodically in a reform‐based mathematics and science teacher preparation program

This study describes the design and use of a valid and reliable instrument to measure teacher candidates' attitudes and beliefs about mathematics and science and the teaching of those subjects. The instrument, Attitudes and Beliefs about the Nature of and the Teaching of Mathematics and Science, was developed for the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation (MCTP), a statewide, standards‐based project in the National Science Foundation's Collaborative in Excellence in Teaching Preparation (CETP) Program. We report on two applications of the instrument: (a) a contrast between MCTP teacher candidates' and non‐MCTP teacher candidates' attitudes and beliefs about mathematics and science as they initially encountered reform‐based instruction in their undergraduate courses, and (b) a landscaping of how the MCTP teacher candidates' attitudes toward and beliefs about mathematics and science evolved over a 2.5‐year period. In support of current reform in science and mathematics teacher education, we determined that over an extended period the MCTP teacher candidates' attitudes and beliefs moved substantively and significantly in the direction intended. However, we also found that the non‐MCTP teacher candidates in the same reform‐based courses did not mirror this improvement in their attitudes and beliefs about mathematics and science or the teaching of those subjects. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 713–737, 2002     

Strike-induced chemical preferences in prairie rattlesnakes (Crotalus viridis)

Prairie rattlesnakes (Crotalus viridis) received exposure to a mouse carcass misted with diluted perfume during predatory strikes, just before or after striking, or in the absence of a strike. They then received a choice between a pair of nonenvenomated carcasses, one misted with the perfume and the other misted with a novel solution. Snakes that struck a perfume-misted carcass preferred the nonenvenomated carcass with chemical cues matching those on the carcass they had struck. However, exposure to chemical cues without striking produced no such preference even when the concentration of perfume solution was 100 times that used in the strike condition. Moreover, exposure to chemical cues just before or after the striking of an unscented carcass produced no subsequent preference for a carcass with matching cues. These results indicate the importance of the predatory strike rather than simple familiarization in the formation of chemical preferences in rattlesnakes.     

Gender,student perceptions,institutional commitments and academic dishonesty: who reports in academic dishonesty cases?

The academic dishonesty literature generally focuses on the causes of academic dishonesty, and outlines deterrence strategies, as well as the punishment methods used in formal sanction. Student self-monitoring techniques are becoming a more visible alternative that places greater emphasis on proactive prevention methods as opposed to reactive punishment policies. Increasing the formal level of student responsibility in deterring academic dishonesty assumes that students will actively monitor the behavior of their classmates. Our findings indicate that student perceptions of campus climate and gender differences are important factors when explaining student reporting of suspected academic dishonesty and may illustrate important prerequisite conditions that must exist prior to the establish of a successful student self-monitoring programme.