On "The 'Oprahfication' of Literacy"

In Mark Hall’s “The ‘Oprahfication’ of Literacy,” we are once again reminded of the phenomenon that literacy is power/empowerment. Hall’s illustration of the occurrence, however, takes it a bit further. He states that it was not merely the literacy itself that made Oprah so powerful. Rather, the healing properties of reading emotionally charged novels about empowerment and the overcoming of obstacles helped Oprah (and has helped others) overcome her own hardships. How, then, is reading different than merely watching a movie of the same theme? Well, a reader takes more ownership in a piece of literature than he or she does in a movie because the reader has to be actively engaged in order to interpret and apply the presented information into action. A movie does the interpreting and presents the visual illustration (psychological transformation of description). Through the work of actors, “real” people are created. Readers of novels (and some non-fiction) identify with and create the characters as extensions of their own personalities because the reader is forced to fill gaps with what he or she is capable of imagining the character doing. First person narration takes this activity even further by forcing the reader to identify his or herself as the storyteller. When a reader of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle readers to herself, “At first, every time I repeated this story to myself, underneath my pillow or inside the refuge of the locked bathroom, it filled me with the same rage, helplessness and sense of betrayal I’d felt at the time,” she reads it as though they were her own words. The “I” is read as the reader’s “I” and so she takes on every emotion and every characteristic of that “I”. The reader feels the rage, helplessness and sense of betrayal. The reader becomes the character in the novel, and so the character’s triumphs are the reader’s. The reader feels empowerment, feels as though she has overcome great obstacles, and so feels she has accomplished and so can accomplish again. The emotions felt during reading are real and so are capable of transforming a reader’s mood and attitude which can thus transform their lives.