Oprah Winfrey, who recently gave away 250 Pontiacs to audience members and treated her staff to a vacation in Los Cabos, Mexico, has set tongues wagging with her incredible generosity.
But perhaps Oprah's most influential philanthropic contribution is Oprah's Book Club, according to English professor Rita Barnard.
Barnard -- who also co-directs the Women's Studies Program -- held a workshop on the topic yesterday evening at 3619 Locust Walk, as part of the Penn Humanities Forum's "History of the Book" series.
In an intimate gathering of students and faculty, Barnard read and discussed her paper on how Oprah has revitalized reading.
"Because of Oprah's Book Club, 900,000 copies of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina were sold this summer," Barnard said. "And to know that so many people have read Anna Karenina is simply wonderful."
Moreover, German professor Bethany Wiggin said that through the book club, "reading has become a form of piety. It is not only a form of self-improvement, but also a way to do good works."
Barnard wrote a literary guide for Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country on the Oprah's Book Club Web site, which she said gave her an inside look at Oprah's "soul-branding" commercial and philanthropic enterprise.
Elizabeth Williamson, a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature, emphasized that by hiring an academic like Barnard to write an online literary guide, Oprah has given readers access to sources otherwise unavailable to them.
"What the Oprah Book Club has done is collapse the distance between readers in Santa Fe and readers in New York and virtually connect them to celebrities like Bill Clinton or Charlize Theron and academic authorities like Professor Barnard," said Jerome Singerman, humanities editor of the University Press.
In addition to making celebrities more accessible to laypeople, Oprah has opened up discussion on pertinent social and political issues through the books she has recommended on the Book Club list.
For Abraham Kyele, a graduate of Temple University's media program, this portion of the talk was particularly interesting.
Speakers and audience members said they were ambivalent about Oprah's growing business, but considered her to be better suited for her influential role than many other celebrities.
"Oprah is not Martha Stewart," said Demie Kurz, co-director of Women's Studies. "She is making money and establishing an enterprise in a highly consumer-oriented culture, but she is also raising the social value of philanthropy."
