The Confessor: Oprah Winfrey, James Frey and the Spectacular Logic of Contemporary Confession

Abstract

This chapter analyses the scandal over James Frey’s fabrication of the truth in his supposed memoir A Million Little Pieces in relation to Oprah Winfrey and her Book Club in order to reveal the ‘double helix’ of contemporary confession: the external, public dimension pertaining to the content of confession, which reaffirms prevailing social ideology and the internal, affective dimension which ‘disciplines the bodies and souls’ of individuals. The successive confessions outlined in this chapter manifest the connection between confession’s external and internal dimensions as well as the anxiety provoked by their apparent unraveling - an anxiety that can only be meaningfully assuaged by Oprah re-inscribing the viewer in the scene as confessor. Show more