32213
Advanced seminar
SoSe 21: The Power of You? Self-Help Literature in America
James Dorson
Comments
The only obstacle to your dreams is you! Be your best self! Unleash the power within! Even if the evidence of structural constraints to our “dreams” is overwhelming, motivational rallying cries like these are more ubiquitous than ever today. Few people believe that such self-help sloganeering actually works—so what is their persistent appeal? Are they ubiquitous not in spite of but because of diminishing social mobility? What cultural work do they perform if economic success or self-realization are rarely their function? Why, in short, is self-help literature a multi-billion-dollar industry?
This class examines the appeal, hitches, and harms of self-help literature in the US. Divided into four segments each focusing on a popular area of self-help—Will, Spirit, Body, and Mind—the class looks at different constructions of selfhood and technologies for disciplining, managing, optimizing, or actualizing the self sold to us by advice books from the nineteenth century to the present. In addition to reading critical assessments of self-help culture and excerpts from classic and contemporary self-help manuals, we will also read the following literary texts that creatively explore, exploit, or challenge the language and meaning of self-help: Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods (2011), Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be: A Novel from Life (2010).
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14 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Tue, 2021-04-13 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-04-20 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-04-27 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-05-04 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-05-11 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-05-18 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-05-25 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-06-01 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-06-08 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-06-15 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-06-22 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-06-29 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-07-06 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2021-07-13 10:00 - 12:00