Oprah's going down

My first-year students crack me up. I love them. They're so damn smart and so willing to put ideas out there that might not be well received in academia--in large part, I imagine, because they haven't been disciplined yet, the students or the ideas. My 101 this semester is called the Politics of Writing, and one of the ways we're getting at the questions of writing and authority is by studying Oprah's book club via R. Mark Hall's article, "The Oprahfication of Literacy." The first major paper assignment asks students to speculate on Oprah's reasons for switching the focus of her book club from contemporary fiction to "classic literature." Yesterday in class we were talking about the different groups of people for whom this switch matters: readers, authors, publishers, bookstores, Oprah herself, etc. At the end of a discussion in which we found ourselves ragging on Oprah pretty harshly, I told them the story I'd seen on the news about how her camera man saved a dog for a man who couldn't take his dog with him when he was being evacuated from New Orleans. Trying to push them out of either/or thinking, I said something along the lines of "Oprah's not all bad. It's much more complex than we sometimes want to make it out to be." To which was responded, "Oprah's going down."