Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T15:57:29.844Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Self-Help Hermeneutic: Its Global History and Literary Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Beth Blum
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The self-improvement industry has been analyzed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including those of sociology, history, and religion, but its relation to literature has not received the attention it demands. Self-help is inextricable from the history and future of reading around the globe. Using Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859) as a case study, I unearth the overlooked role of the self-help hermeneutic, a practical reading method that collapses period, nation, and genre in the global dissemination of literary culture. I then demonstrate that the pastiche didacticism of Smiles's early readers has become a mainstream conceit of twenty-first-century novels, including Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, and Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?. By putting on hold the standard critique of the genre's homogeneous neoliberal influence, I recalibrate the scales by which we measure self-help's literary and political relevance.

Type
Special Topic: Cultures of Reading
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 5: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , October 2018 , pp. 1099 - 1117
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abani, Chris. Graceland. Picador, 2004.Google Scholar
Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. Anchor Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Adelkhah, Fariba. Being Modern in Iran. Columbia UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Adorno, Theodor. The Stars Down to Earth. Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Anderson, Amanda. “The Liberal Aesthetic”. Theory after “Theory,” edited by Elliott, Jane and Attridge, Derek, Routledge, 2011, pp. 249–61.Google Scholar
Argov, Sherry. Why Men Love Bitches. Adams Media, 2000.Google Scholar
Aw, Tash. “A Conversation With: Novelist Tash Aw.” Interview by Neha Thirani Bagri. The New York Times, 18 Nov. 2013, india.blogs.nytimesxom/2013/11/18/a -conversation-with-novelist-tash-aw/.Google Scholar
Aw, Tash. “Five People Chasing the Five-Star Dream.” Interview by Andrew Moody. China Daily Europe, 1 Nov. 2013, europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2013-11/01/content_17073769.htm.Google Scholar
Aw, Tash. Five Star Billionaire. Spiegel and Grau, 2013.Google Scholar
Aw, Tash. “Tash Aw: A Life in Writing.” Interview by Maya Jaggi. The Guardian, 15 Mar. 2013, www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/15/tash-aw-life-in-writing.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Indiana UP, 2006.
Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. translated by Heath, Stephen, Hill and Wang, 1997.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller”. Illuminations, by Benjamin, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 83–109.Google Scholar
Berthoud, Ella, and Elderkin, Susan. The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You. Penguin Books, 2014.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Blum, Beth. “Self-Help: The Other Fantasy Fiction”. Aeon Ideas, 4 May 2015, aeon.co/conversations/should-the-self-help -sections-of-bookshops-be-re-labelled -wishful-thinking.Google Scholar
Blum, Beth. “The Self-Helpification of Academe”. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 July 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/he-Self-Helpification-of/243861.Google Scholar
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. 1924. Ann Arbor, 1972.Google Scholar
Burke, Kenneth. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, U of California P, 1941, pp. 293–304.Google Scholar
Butwell, Richard. U Nu of Burma. Stanford UP, 1963.Google Scholar
Carlson, Richard. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff and It's All Small Stuff: Simple Ways to Keep Little hings from Taking Over Your Life. Hyperion Books, 1997.Google Scholar
Carnegie, Marc. “Western Self-Help Books Selling in Iran”. The Mercury, 5 June 2001, www.iol.co.za/mercury/world/western-self-help-books-selling-in-iran-67611.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Foreword. The Ambiguous Allure of the West: The Colonial in hailand, edited by Harrison, Rachel V. and Jackson, Peter A., Hong Kong UP/Cornell UP, 2010, pp. vii-xvii.Google Scholar
Diaz, Junot. “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)”. Drown, Riverhead Books, 1996, pp. 139–49.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Estes and Lauriat, 1881.Google Scholar
Duke, Benjamin C. The History of Modern Japanese Education: Constructing the National School System, 1872-1890. Rutgers UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Dunn, John. Review of My Odyssey: An Autobiography, by Nnamdi Azikiwe. The Spectator, no. 226, 8 May 1971, p. 634.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Penguin Books, 1994.Google Scholar
Elshakry, Marwa. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950. U of Chicago P, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esty, Jed. “The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe”. Victorian Studies, vol. 49, no. 3, Spring 2007, pp. 407–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Harvard UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “How We Behave: Sex, Food, and Other Ethical Matters.” Interview by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Vanity Fair, vol. 46, no. 9, 1983, pp. 60–69.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse”. Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, edited by Young, Robert, Routledge, 1981, pp. 48–79.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Glissant, Édouard. L'imaginaire des langues: Entretiens avec Lise Gauvin. Gallimard, 2010.Google Scholar
Goodlad, Lauren. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State. Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Guinn, Jeff. Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. Simon and Schuster, 2013.Google Scholar
Hamid, Mohsin. “He's Seen Our Future.” Interview by Bryan Appleyard. The Sunday Times, 17 Mar. 2013, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hes-seen-our-future-q30q6dvcn2g.Google Scholar
Hamid, Mohsin. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Riverhead Books, 2013.Google Scholar
Hamid, Mohsin. “Mohsin Hamid Comes Home to Roost in Pakistan.” Interview by Reed Johnson. Los Angeles Times, 14 Mar. 2013, articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/14/entertainment/la-et-jc-mohsin-hamid-20130314.Google Scholar
Hamid, Mohsin. Mohsin Hamid: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Interview by Alison Cuddy. YouTube, uploaded by Chicago Humanities Festival, 14 Mar. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EaIkSNAsWU.Google Scholar
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Harcourt Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Hayot, Eric. “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time”. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Wollaeger, Mark and Eatough, Matthew, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 149–70.Google Scholar
Heti, Sheila. “How Should a Novel Be? Don't Ask Sheila Heti.” Interview with John Barber. The Globe and Mail, 13 Apr. 2013, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/how-should-a-novel-be-dont-ask-sheila-heti/article11134050/.Google Scholar
Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be? Picador, 2013.Google Scholar
Heti, Sheila. “How Should a Person Be? Talking to Sheila Heti.” Interview by Adam Robinson. Bomb, 11 June 2012, bombmagazine.org/articles/how-should-a-person-be-talking-to-sheila-heti/.Google Scholar
Heti, Sheila. “Interview with Sheila Heti.” By Madeleine Schwartz. The Harvard Advocate, theharvardadvocate.com/article/205/interview-with-sheila-heti/. Accessed 6 Nov. 2015.Google Scholar
Heti, Sheila. “Sheila Heti on Girls, Self-Help Books, and Why We Do Drugs.” Interview by Shona Sanzgiri. San Francisco Weekly, 22 June 2012, www.sfweekly.com/culture/interview-sheila-heti-on-girls-self-help-books-and-why-we-do-drugs/.Google Scholar
Heti, Sheila. “Sheila Heti on Her Novel, How Should a Person Be?” Interview by Henry Giardina. Bullett Media, 20 June 2012, bullettmedia.com/article/sheila- heti/.Google Scholar
Hilkey, Judith. Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America. U of North Carolina P, 1997.Google Scholar
Hirakawa, Sukehiro. Japan's Love-Hate Relationship with the West. Global Oriental, 2005.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. U of California P, 1983.Google Scholar
Holland, Jessica. “Saving Self-Help from Itself”. Prospect Magazine, 20 Dec. 2010, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/self-help-burkeman-bibiliotherapy-school-of-life.Google Scholar
Illouz, Eva. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. U of California P, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaji, Tsitsi. “Cassava Westerns: Theorizing the Pleasures of Playing the Outlaw in Africa”. The Western in the Global South, edited by Higgins, Mary Ellen et al., Routledge, 2015, pp. 24–41.Google Scholar
Kapuscinski, Ryszard. The Shadow of the Sun. translated by Gloweczewska, Klara, Vintage Canada, 2002.Google Scholar
Kenney, Jeffrey T. “Selling Success, Nurturing the Self: Self-Help Literature, Capitalist Values, and the Sacralization of Subjective Life in Egypt”. International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 47, no. 4, Nov. 2015, pp. 663–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinmonth, Earl H. “Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles: A Victorian Confucian and a Confucian Victorian”. he American Historical Review, vol. 85, no. 3, June 1980, pp. 535–56.Google Scholar
Kishi, Tetsuo, and Bradshaw, Graham. Shakespeare in Japan. Continuum Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Knudson, Sarah. “Crash Courses and Lifelong Journeys: Modes of Reading Non-fiction Advice in a North American Audience”. Poetics, vol. 41, no. 3, June 2013, pp. 211–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kockum, Keiko. “The Role of Western Literature in the Formation of the Modern Japanese Novel”. Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective, edited by Gunilla Linberg-Wada, vol. 3, Walter de Gruyer, 2006, pp. 97–140.Google Scholar
Laferrière, Dany. How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired. translated by Homel, David, Douglas and Mclntyre, 1989.Google Scholar
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W.W. Norton, 1979.Google Scholar
Leavis, F.R. D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.Google Scholar
Lichterman, Paul. “Self-Help Reading as Tin Culture”. Media, Culture and Society, vol. 14, no. 3, July 1992, pp. 421–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locher, Miriam. Advice Online: Advice Giving in an American Internet Health Column. John Benjamins Publishing, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lynch, Thomas. Lectures in Aid of Self-Improvement: Addressed to Young Men and Others. Longman, 1853.Google Scholar
Martyris, Nina. “Gatsby over Gandhi: The Asian Jazz Age”. The Missouri Review, vol. 37, no. 2, 2014, pp. 173–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Master of Life (Sunday Okenwa Olisah). “No Condition Is Permanent by the Master of Life.” Thometz, Life, pp. 77–103.Google Scholar
McGee, Micki. Self- Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. Oxford UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meckier, Jerome. “Great Expectations and Self-Help: Dickens Frowns on Smiles.” he Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 100, no. 4, Oct. 2001, pp. 537–54.Google Scholar
Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal hought. U of Chicago P, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Laura. “here's More than Manga: Popular Non-fiction Books and Magazines”. A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, edited by Robertson, Jennifer, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 314–26.Google Scholar
Minoru, Toyoda. Shakespeare in Japan: An Historical Survey. Shakespeare Association of Japan by the Iwanami Shoten, 1940.Google Scholar
Mishra, Pankaj. “Asia: ‘he Explosive Transformation.‘” The New York Review of Books, 25 Apr. 2013, www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/04/25/asia-explosive-transformation/.Google Scholar
Moaveni, Azadeh. “Seeking Signs of Literary Life in Iran”. The New York Times, 27 May 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/review/Moaveni-t.html.Google Scholar
Moore, Lorrie. “How to Be an Other Woman”. Self-Help: Stories, Vintage Contemporaries, 1985, pp. 1–22.Google Scholar
Moosa, Matti. The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997.Google Scholar
Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr. Biswas. Random House, 1989.Google Scholar
Newell, Stephanie. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: How to Play the Game of Life. Indiana UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Thiong'o, Ngûgĩ wa. In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir. Pantheon Books, 2012.Google Scholar
Obiechina, Emmanuel N. An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets. Cambridge UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Odili, Frank E. “What Is Life?” hometz, Life, pp. 315–37.Google Scholar
Olisah, Sunday Okenwa (see also The Master of Life). “Money Hard to Get but Easy to Spend.” Thometz, Life, pp. 107–30.Google Scholar
Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Polity Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Poon, Angelia. “Helping the Novel: Neoliberalism, Self-Help, and the Narrating of the Self in Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia!” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 52, no. 1, 11 May 2015, pp. 139–50.Google Scholar
Pound, Ezra. How to Read. Harmsworth, 1931.Google Scholar
Price, Leah. “When Doctors Prescribe Books to Heal the Mind”. The Boston Globe, 22 Dec. 2013, www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/12/22/when-doctors-prescribe-books-heal-mind/H2mbhLnTJ3Gy96BS8TUgiL/story.html.Google Scholar
Rimke, Heidi Marie. “Governing Citizens through Self-Help Literature”. Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2000, pp. 61–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Barbara. Tsuda Umeko and Women's Education in Japan. Yale UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Yale UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. “How Not to Get Gored”. he London Review of Books, 21 Nov. 1985, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar
Salmenniemi, Suvi, and Vorona, Mariya. “Reading Self-Help Literature in Russia: Governmentality, Psychology, Subjectivity”. The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 65, no. 1, Mar. 2014, pp. 43–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schayegh, Cyrus. Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950. U of California P, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shahidian, Hammad. “Contesting Discourses of Sexuality in Post-revolutionary Iran”. Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East, edited by Ilkkaracan, Pinar, Ashgate, 2008, pp. 101–38.Google Scholar
Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Vintage Books, 2011.Google Scholar
Simonds, Wendy. Women and Self-Help Culture. Rutgers UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Smiles, Samuel. The Autobiography of Samuel Smiles. E.P. Dutton, 1905.Google Scholar
Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. Harper and Brothers, 1877.Google Scholar
Soyinka, Wole. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture. Methuen, 1993.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. How to Write. Plain Edition, 1931.Google Scholar
Strausbaugh, John. “High Life and Mad English.” New York Press, 24 Nov.-4 Dec. 2001, www.autodidactproject.org/other/thometz.html.Google Scholar
Taylor, Verta. Rock-a-by Baby: Feminism, Self-Help, and Postpartum Depression. Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
Thomas, David Wayne. Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic. U of Pennsylvania P, 2004.Google Scholar
Thometz, Kurt. “High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English.” Thometz, Life, pp. xiii-xliv.Google Scholar
Thometz, Kurt, editor. Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English. Pantheon Books, 2001.Google Scholar
Tiffin, Helen. “Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse”. Kunapipi, vol. 9, no. 3, 1987, pp. 17–34.Google Scholar
von Schwerin, Friederike. High Shakespeare, Reception and Translation: Germany and Japan. Continuum, 2004.Google Scholar
White, Landeg. V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction. Barnes and Noble Books, 1975.Google Scholar
Wood, James. “True Lives: Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?” The New Yorker, 25 June 2012, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/25/true-lives-2.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. “How Should One Read a Book?” The Second Common Reader, Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, pp. 258–70.Google Scholar
Yavari, Houra. “The Persian Novel.” Iran Chamber Society, 2002, www.iranchamber.com/literature/articles/persian_novel.php.Google Scholar
Zaidan, Jurji. The Autobiography of Jurji Zaidan. translated by Phillip, homas, Three Continents Press, 1990.Google Scholar