This thesis explores the ways in which selfhood is constructed and expressed in The Oprah Winfrey Show. The current debate on talk shows within Media Studies tends to cohere around two positions. On the one hand, talk shows are seen as exemplars of Trash TV in which confessions of private pain are exploited for commercial gain. On the other hand, the programmes are seen as a site of empowerment for marginalised people normally denied a voice in the public sphere. This thesis moves away from this binary by examining the cultural context in which Oprah is produced. It examines the show in the light of two distinctive, but at times, overlapping, traditions of thought in American culture in which conflicting versions of self are constructed. These two traditions are the' elite' cultural criticism, and an African American mode of thought that includes a black feminist perspective. The thesis argues that these traditions represent systematic discursive cultural practices that are available as a means through which to read the show. In the 'elite' cultural criticism, selfhood is constructed as empty, anxious, fragmented and dislocated. This version of self is the product of commercialism, commodification and image saturation and is made manifest in the popularisation of therapy. In the strand of African American thought that this thesis discusses, the self is posited as recoverable through the excavation of a personal and collective history, through story-telling, and is situated in relation to close, significant others. The thesis argues that Oprah is an ambivalent text in which both versions of selfhood are identifiable. Further, it is argued that the persona of Oprah Winfrey is the embodied site of these conflicts, acting as the conduit for the expression of a self that emerges from the clash of antagonistic forces. Thus, The Oprah Winfrey Show is used as a case study for the exploration of the ways in which contradictory cultural constructions of self combine in a carnivalesque play to produce something new. This thesis makes the case for an avoidance of the binary that marks the TV talk show debate by exploring the ambivalence that constitutes the text. This, it is argued, presents a fruitful way of thinking through the complexities of a popular cultural phenomenon such as Oprah.

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

Nach einem Überblick über die theoretischen Erklärungsmodelle der diskursiven Subjektkonstitution von Émile Benveniste über Louis Althusser und Michel Foucault zu linguistischen Ansätzen in der Gesprächsanalyse und social semiotics angelsächsischer Provenienz, werden zwei erfolgreiche US-amerikanische "Ratgeber"-Talkshowreihen der neunziger Jahre ("Oprah Winfrey" und "Rolonda") einer umfassenden pragma-linguistisch orientierten Gesprächsanalyse unterzogen. Dazu war es nötig, je drei Sendungen dieser Shows zuerst vollständig zu transkribieren, sie dann in Phasen einzuteilen und Vergleichskriterien zu bestimmen. Die Ausgangshypothese ist, dass trotz großer Ähnlichkeiten im Format, beide Shows erhebliche Unterschiede in der öffentlichen Darstellungsform bzw. Repräsentanz ihrer Teilnehmerrollen (Talkmaster, Gäste und Publikum) und deren Verhältnis zueinander aufweisen, und dass diese erheblichen Abweichungen dem Mikrobereich der lexiko-grammatisch systematisch erfaß- und beschreibbaren Redeweisen und Gesprächsstrukturen implizit eingeschrieben ist. Kernstück der Arbeit ist die Herausarbeitung von Ebenen, auf denen sich diskursiv show-spezifische Teilnehmer-Identitäten konstituieren: Dialogsequenzierung und -organisation, Gebrauch von Personalpronomen und Anredeformen, Fragetypen, narrative Strategien, lexikalische (Selbst-) Kategorisierungen, sämtliche Bereiche der Modalität. Auf dieser Ebene der interpersonellen Funktion von Sprache werden innerhalb der Show-Sendungen und zwischen den beiden Show-Reihen sehr unterschiedliche Gesprächsstrategien deutlich, die sich erstaunlich plausibel mit Foucaults diskursiven Subjektivierungs- vs. Objektivierungsstrategien korrelieren ließen, und also als unterschiedliche Machttechnologien zur Hervorbringung und Reproduktion spezifischer "öffentlicher Subjekte" darstellen, wie sie in medialen Formaten als Abbilder des "Durchschnittsmenschen" in Erscheinung treten. Sie signifizieren Varianten eines "Alltags"-Subjekts (repräsentiert durch die in der Show zu Alltagsproblemen befragten Gäste in ihrem Verhältnis zu Talkmaster und Studiopublikum), das einmal - neoliberal-protestantisch - als rational-einsichtsfähig sich selbst disziplinierend im Diskursfeld des Neoliberalismus-Protestantismus konstituiert und gezeichnet wird, im anderen Falle als irrational-verantwortungslos fremden Regulierungsinstanzen und außengelenkten sprachlichen Disziplinierungs- und Abbitteritualen unterworfen wird und somit eine Teilnehmerrolle innerhalb autoritär-feudalistischen Diskurse charakterisiert.

With her Book Club, talk show host Oprah Winfrey has used the relatively new technology of television to revive literature. Despite the odds against her--selecting hard-to-read, quirky books by generally unknown authors--Winfrey has successfully created women's spaces for the 1990s, not so different from the American women's social clubs from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the French salons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study will show how Oprah's Book Club allows readers, especially women, to use the psychological processes of transference and transactional reading by using fictional literature from the Book Club to discuss sensitive areas of their lives.

Recent queer scholarship challenges the academy’s longstanding urban and adult oriented trajectory, pointing to the way such studies ignore rural and heartland regions of the country as well as the experiences of youth. In this thesis, I craft a limited ethnographic methodological approach together with a textual analysis of The Oprah Winfrey Show to deliver portraits of gay men living in various rural or heartland areas who use their television sets to encounter and identify with LGBTQ people across the nation. The overarching aim of this project is to explore the ways in which religion, rurality, and Oprah coalesce in the process of identity creation to form rural gay men’s conceptual selves and how they are then informed by that identity formation. I will focus my textual analyses through the frames of six of Oprah Winfrey’s “ultimate viewers” to elucidate how they receive and interact with her star text, how they use television sets in the public rooms of their homes to create boundary public spheres, and how they are impacted by the show’s various uses of the coming out paradigm. In so doing, this thesis seeks to contribute to the scholarship of rural queer studies, television studies, and Oprah studies. / text