Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 43-45). Also available via the World Wide Web.

The traditional notions of value rooted in the system of physical print publication have been irrevocably altered by the emergence of electronic publication. Where the value of the book could once be easily quantified as a tangible product which contained and conferred various forms of value, this value has now been challenged by the proliferation of digital products. Contemporary studies of literary value have so far been dominated by the theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his distinctions of capital value, and while his theories are a productive means of exploring the problem of distinguishing value, digitization lessens the necessity for and value of the traditional institutional imprimatur which Bourdieu predominantly focuses on. This is so because digital technology has given writers an unprecedented ability to engage directly in mass public discourse and for readers to circumvent intended modes of reading. My thesis thus explores how value has been redefined in the digital age by questioning whether the digital literary paradigm is not altogether unlike the print-based one. By treating all aspects of each paradigm as information, be it the text or identity, my thesis conducts a meta-analysis of the social and cultural operations underlying the evaluation and evolution of value in the field of literature.

Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

We'd Love to Have You on Our Show is a collection of short fiction preceded by a critical introduction. The stories share a thematic bond in that that all of the protagonists are either obsessed with or could be guests on talk shows. The introduction, "The Meaning of Yearning" explores how Robert Olen Butler and Denis Johnson have influenced me as a young writer attempting to write interconnected, character-driven stories. The introduction begins by chronologically showing how I wrote and then how I changed from workshops to writing this thesis, and it concludes by examining character, theme, and humor throughout Butler's, Johnson's, and my own stories.

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.

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

This thesis explores how the term bitch functions as an ideograph in a heavily mediated, third wave moment. Bitch is important to study due to its potentially negative implications for women and feminism. The study attempts to expand rhetorical scholarship’s current understanding of not only the ideograph, but third wave feminism and the current mediated moment. This thesis uses Oprah Winfrey’s announcement to ban the word bitch from her network, OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), as a case study. I argue that the media that responded to Winfrey’s announcement contributed to a single, overarching narrative that reinforced that the word bitch is harmful to women. This thesis begins with Chapter One, which is an introduction and rationale that explains why the prevalence of bitch in a mediated society is worthy of study. Chapter Two is a review of the literature that explores the history of the word bitch and a consideration of third wave feminism. In Chapter Three, I review the methodology that guides this study by discussing feminist rhetorical criticism, how previous scholarship has treated mediated texts, and consideration of the ideograph. In Chapter Four, I analyze Oprah Winfrey’s ban of the word bitch from OWN. In Chapter Five, I articulate how bitch functioned as an ideograph, the role the media played in the case study, and a consideration of implications for rhetorical scholarship and directions of future research. / Literature -- Critical orientation -- Analysis -- Bitch and empowerment / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Department of Communication Studies

This analysis utilizes the computer-based content analysis program DICTION to gain a better understanding of Oprah Winfrey's specific discourse types (praise, blame, and standard) and her language surrounding the James Frey Controversy. Grounded in Social Influence Theory, this thesis argues that is important to understand the language styles of such a significant rhetor in society because she has the potential to influence the public. The findings indicate that Oprah's discourse types differ in the level of Optimism her language represents and that the two episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show relating to the James Frey Controversy differ in terms of the Certainty. Also, this thesis provides a new application of the program DICTION and the implications for such procedures are discussed. / Department of Communication Studies

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