INTRODUCTION
1. Paula Cocozza, How to Be Human (New York: Viking, 2017); Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World (New York: Doubleday, 2016).
2. Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? [2010] (New York: Picador, 2012); Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (New York: Vintage, 2010); Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (New York: Riverhead, 2013); Eleanor Davis, How to Be Happy (Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics, 2014); Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (New York: Penguin, 2015); Jesse Ball, How to Set a Fire and Why (New York: Vintage, 2016); Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler (New York: Riverhead, 2018).
4. Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” New York Review of Books 47, no. 20 (2000): 82–87.
5. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 19.
6. Wendy Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 47.
7. Alex Williams, “The Gospel According to Pinterest,” New York Times, October 3, 2012.
8. Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture, 133.
10. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 17.
11. Carnegie, How to Win Friends, 13.
12. Quoted in Steven Watts, Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America (New York: Other Press, 2013), 131.
13. Gail Thain Parker, “How to Win Friends and Influence People: Dale Carnegie and the Problem of Sincerity,” American Quarterly 29, no. 5 (1977): 506.
14. A. R. Craig, Room at the Top (Chicago: Sumner, 1883), 3.
15. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142.
16. J. M. O’Neill, “The True Story of $10,000 Fears,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 5, no. 2 (1919): 121–37.
17. Quoted in Watts, Self-Help Messiah, 178.
19. See Watts, 180. All That I Have describes a love triangle between Jean Burns, a young woman desperate to escape the stifling confines of her hometown; Forrest Croy, a wealthy Missouri businessman who impregnates Jean right before he enlists in the U.S. Army, only to die before they can marry; and Reverend Wendell Phillips Curnutt, a charismatic preacher (and Carnegie alter ego) who altruistically convinces the pregnant Jean to become engaged to him after Croy’s death, until, in an awkward twist, the falsely deceased Croy returns.
20. Quoted in Watts, 185.
22. “Créer un poncif, c’est le génie. Je dois créer un poncif” [To Create a Cliché, This Is Genius. I Must Create a Cliché], from Charles Baudelaire, “Fusées,” in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 23.
23. Dorothy Carnegie, preface to the 1981 edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie (New York: Pocket, 1981), xi.
24. Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (New York: Fireside, 1963); Toby Young, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2002).
25. A. Victor Segno, The Law of Mentalism (Los Angeles: American Institute of Mentalism, 1902), 138–39.
26. Carnegie, How to Win Friends, 38, 37.
27. Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), xiv.
28. Sociologist Patricia Neville explains that the study of self-help has attracted scholars “from psychology to sociology to media studies, cultural studies and feminism.” Notably absent from the list is the discipline of literary criticism. Patricia Neville, “Helping Self-Help Books: Working Towards a New Research Agenda,” Interactions Studies in Communications and Culture 3, no. 3 (2012): 363.
30. For a sampling of these approaches, see Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Steven Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989); Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Roy M. Anker, Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture: An Interpretive Guide (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999).
31. T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” Advertising and Society Review 1, no. 1 (2000): 2.
32. Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle Class Americans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 16.
33. Leah Price, “Bibliotherapy and Its Others,” in Literature and Human Flourishing, ed. James English and Heather Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
34. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril Educational, 1962); Ovid, The Art of Love, trans. James Michie (New York: Random House Modern Library, 2002); Epictetus, The Encheiridion, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Edinburgh: Loeb Classical Library, 1928).
35. Cicero, De Officiis [On Obligations], trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Elizabeth Joceline, The Mothers Legacie to Her Unborn Child (London: John Haviland, 1622); Sir Walter Raleigh, Instructions to His Sonne and to Posteritie (London: Printed for Benjamin Fisher, dwelling in Aldersgate-street at the Talbot, 1632); Rudolphe M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
36. Cotton Mather, Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good [1710]. Facs. Reprod. With an Intr. By J. K. Piercy.
37. Joseph Alleine, A Sure Guide to Heaven (London: 1689); Belzebub, A Sure Guide to Hell (London: 1751).
38. For more on conduct books, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New York: Macmillan, 1946); Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in the History of Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1987). Complementary conduct literature for boys most famously took the form of Horatio Alger’s enormously popular tales, which described the mix of luck and wit necessary to urban prosperity. Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (New York: Signet, 2014).
39. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin [1791]. Penn reading project ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 72–73.
40. Carnegie, How to Win Friends, 38.
41. Benjamin Franklin, “From the Morals of Confucius,” Pennsylvania Gazette, February 28–May 7, 1738, 2.
42. Quoted in Alfred Owen Aldridge, The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1993), 27–28.
43. David Weir, American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 20.
44. Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket, 170; Irvin Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954), xi. I do not mean to single out these texts alone; this conception is characteristic of the overwhelming majority of self-help research that has been undertaken, chiefly by scholars in American studies.
45. Eric C. Hendriks, “China’s Self-Help Industry: American(ized) Life Advice in China,” in Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in China, ed. Michael Keane (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2016), 313.
46. Earl H. Kinmonth, “Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles: A Victorian Confucian and a Confusion Victorian,” The American Historical Review 85, no. 3 (June 1980): 535.
47. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), 25.
48. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 68.
49. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (London: Chapman & Hall, 1831), 70; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841; Smiles, Self-Help.
50. Smiles, Self-Help, 25.
51. J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living 1790–1960: A Study in the History of the English Adult Education Movement (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1961), 55.
52. Smiles, Self-Help, 366.
53. William Robinson, Self-Education, or The Value of Mental Culture (London: Hamilton, 1845), 92–98.
54. George Cary Eggleston, preface to How to Make a Living: Suggestions Upon the Art of Making, Saving, and Using Money (New York: Putnam, 1874).
55. Gertrude Stein, How to Write (Paris: Plain Edition, 1931); Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934); Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book [1925] in The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harvest, 1986), 258–70, at 258.
56. Sandra Dolby, for instance, in an interesting book, describes “the self-help book as a historical phenomenon emerging out of the 1960s and 1970s and continuing in full force into the new millennium.” Sandra Dolby, Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 11.
57. Mercè Mur Effing, “US Self-Help literature and the Call of the East” (PhD dissertation, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2011), 51.
58. Horace Fletcher, Menticulture (Chicago: McClurg, 1895), 42.
59. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds., William and Henry James: Selected Letters (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 517.
60. Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 6–10.
61. Émile Coué, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion, trans. Archibald Stark Van Orden (New York: Malkan, 1922), 8. Despite his influence on the movement, Coué distinguished himself from New Thought practitioners.
62. The Saturday Review, quoted in Dean Rapp, “‘Better and Better’—Couéism as a Psychological Craze of the Twenties in England,” Studies in Popular Culture 10, no. 2 (1987): 24.
63. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York: Horace Liveright, 1920), 374.
64. See discussion of this in Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 153.
65. Maury Klein, Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 125.
66. E. J. Hardy, How to Be Happy Though Married: Being a Handbook to Marriage, 7th ed. (London: T. F. Unwin, 1887); Spencer Wallis, The Scientific Elimination of Failure (1912); Vance Thomson, Eat and Grow Thin (New York: Dutton, 1914); C. Franklin Leavitt, Are You You? (Chicago: Advanced Thought, 1921); Elsie Lincoln Benedict, How to Analyze People on Sight: The Five Human Types (East Aurora, N.Y.: Roycrofters, 1921); Genevieve Behrend, “How to Live Life and Love It,” in The Writings of Genevieve Behrend: Your Invisible Power; Attaining Your Desires; How to Live Life and Love It [1929] (New York: Start Publishing, 2013); Orisen Swett Marden, The Conquest of Worry (London: Rider, 1924); R. H. Jarrett, It Works [1926] (Camarillo, Calif.: DeVorss, 2000); Joseph L. Greenbaum, What the Hell Are You Living For? (New York: Mass, 1927); Ernest Dimnet, The Art of Thinking (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928); Walter B. Pitkin, Life Begins at Forty: How to Make Sure You Enjoy Middle Age (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1932).
67. They also developed as offshoots of niche spiritual/occultist periodicals such Self-Culture Magazine (Chicago: Werner, 1895–1900); New Thought: An Organ of Optimism (Chicago and New York: Psychic Research Company; New Thought, 1901–1910); Mental Science Magazine and Mind Cure Journal (Chicago: Mental Science University, 1886–1889); The New Age, ed. A. R. Orage (London: New Age Press, 1907–1922); The Problem of Life, ed. W. J. Colville (San Francisco: Unity, 1890–1894); Success Magazine, ed. Orison Swett Marden (New York: Lowry-Marden, 1897–1912).
68. Charles Baudelaire, “Let Us Flay the Poor” [Assomons les Pauvres!], in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed. T. R. Smith (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), 102–104.
69. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (New York: Routledge, 1984), 24.
70. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
71. Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 7.
72. Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (London: Picador, 1998); Ilana Simons, A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf (New York: Penguin, 2007); James Hawes, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008); Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: Norton, 2009); Marty Beckerman, The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy Chested Retro Sexual Lesson Within (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011); Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013); Nina Lorez Collins, What Would Virginia Woolf Do? (New York: Grand Central Life & Style, 2018).
73. Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (New York: Crown, 2009), 54.
74. Paul Pearsall, The Last Self-Book You’ll Ever Need (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 19.
75. Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 97, 88.
76. Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 42.
77. See, for instance, Laurie Maguire, Where There’s a Will There’s a Way, or All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare (New York: Penguin, 2006); Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010); Lori Smith, The Jane Austen Guide to Life: Thoughtful Lessons for the Modern Woman (Guilford, Conn.: Pequot Press, 2012).
78. Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?”, in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 35.
80. Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011), 50.
81. Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 1–33.
82. Virginia Woolf, “Middlebrow,” [October 1932, unsent] in “To The Editor of the New Statesman” published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), 183.
83. Dwight Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club,” The New Yorker, November 29, 1952; “Howtoism” The New Yorker, May 22, 1954; “Masscult and Midcult: I,” Partisan Review 27, no. 4 (Fall 1960): 203–33; and “Masscult and Midcult: II,” Partisan Review 27, no. 4 (Fall 1960): 589–631, at 609.
84. Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket, 64, 93.
85. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950).
86. Macdonald, “Howtoism,” 91, 85.
87. Aubry, Reading as Therapy.
88. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love (New York: Viking, 2006).
89. For a useful account of the therapeutic in contemporary culture and intellectual history, see Timothy Aubry and Trish Travis, Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), at 3, 8.
89. For helpful discussions of this, see Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014); and John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).
90. Alexander Linklater, “Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations by Jules Evans—Review,” The Guardian, June 16, 2012.
91. See New York Times blurb on back cover of Eva Hoffman, How to Be Bored (London: Macmillan, 2016).
93. Promotional endpapers for A. Craig, Room at the Top, Or How to Reach Success, Happiness, Fame and Fortune (Chicago: Henry A. Sumner, 1883).
94. Peter Kyne, The Go-Getter: A Story That Tells You How to Be One (New York: Rinehart, 1921).
95. See “Ulysses Lands,” Time, January 29, 1934; see also Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture, 138–39.
97. Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 76–77.
98. Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 20.
99. Hoffman, How to Be Bored; Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness, 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (New York: Penguin, 2014), promotional materials.
100. Seneca, How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management, trans. James Romm (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019).
101. Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 138.
102. Brinkmann, Stand Firm, 13, 88.
103. Eleanor Davis, How to be Happy, 139.
104. Front pages for How to Be Happy, by Davis.
108. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, in Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), 94.
109. Flaubert, Oeuvres Complètes de Gustave Flaubert, Vol. 10, Correspondence II (1850–1859) (Paris: Club de l’honnête homme, 1974–1976), 99.
110. Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (New York: Knopf, 2014), 114.
111. Sianne Ngai, “Theory of the Gimmick,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 473.
112. Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 8.
113. Ole Jacob Madsen, Optimizing the Self: Social Representations of Self-help (London: Routledge, 2015), 3.
114. McGee, Self-Help, Inc., 138.
115. Theodor Adorno, “Free Time,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991); Foucault, Technologies of the Self; Michel Foucault interview by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “How We Behave: Sex, Food, and Other Ethical Matters,” Vanity Fair 46, no. 9 (1983).
116. See Neville, “Helping Self-Help Books,” for an excellent elucidation of this impasse.
117. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization”; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979); Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
118. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). However, as Neville notes, there is division on the subject even within feminist criticism. See Neville, “Helping Self-Help Books,” 365.
119. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 193; McGee, Self-Help, Inc., 24.
120. Verta Taylor, Rock-a-By Baby: Feminism, Self-Help, and Postpartum Depression (New York: Routledge, 1996), 23.
121. Audre Lorde, Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1988), 131.
122. Henry A. Giroux, “From ‘Manchild’ to ‘Baby Boy’: Race and the Politics of Self-Help,” JAC 22, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 529, 530; see also Paul Gilroy, “‘We Got to Get Over Before We Go Under’: Fragments for a History of Black Vernacular Neoliberalism,” New Formations 80–81 (Winter 2013): 23–38.
123. Gayle McKeen, “Whose Rights? Whose Responsibility? Self-Help in African American Thought,” Polity 34, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 414, 412.
124. McKeen, “Whose Rights?”, 409.
125. W. E. B. Du Bois, Africa, Its Geography, People and Products (Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius, 1930); W. E. B. Du Bois, Africa—Its Place in Modern History (Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius, 1930); see also Eric Schocket, “Proletarian Paperbacks: The Little Blue Books and Working-Class Culture,” College Literature 29, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 74.
126. Richard Wright, “Self-Help in Negro Education” (Philadelphia: Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Interests of the Colored Race, 1909); and Richard Wright, “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem,” Free World (September 1946): 351, where he references the “fanatic forms of violent self-help (crime)” to which Harlem youth seek recourse.
127. Chris Abani, GraceLand (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004).
128. Todd Tiede, Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake Oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our Nation’s Soul (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001); Wendy Kaminer, I’m Dysfunctional You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1992); Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Ruined America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); Steve Salerno, SHAM: The Self-Help and Actualization Movement (New York: Crown, 2005).
129. McGee, Self-Help, Inc., 16.
131. Richard Butler, U Nu of Burma (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1963), 31; Hammad Shahidian, “Contesting Discourses of Sexuality in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” in Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East, ed. Pinar İlkkaracan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 101–38, at 102.
132. Jeff Guinn, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 59–62.
133. See the representation of self-help in Zadie Smith, NW: A Novel (New York: Penguin 2012); and Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.
134. William Shinker quoted in Kachka, “The Power of Positive Publishing.”
135. John T. Fenner and Audrey Fenner, “Retrospective Collection Development: Selecting a Core for Research in ‘New Thought’,” in Selecting Materials for Library Collections, ed. Linda S. Katz (New York: Routledge, 2012), 194.
136. Amy Blair, Reading Up: Middle Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Twentieth Century United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 8.
137. Joan Shelley Rubin, “Making Meaning: Analysis and Affect in the Study and Practice of Reading,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 511.
139. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice Radway, A History of the Book in America: Vol. 4, Print in Motion, The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 666, 4.
140. Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces”; Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1940); Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: A Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); Blair, Reading Up.
141. Jeffrey T. Kenney, “Selling Success, Nurturing the Self,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2005): 671.
142. Jennifer Fleissner, “Historicism Blues,” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 699–713; V21 Collective, “Manifesto of the V21 Collective,” V21: Victorian Studies for the 21st Century, http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses; Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization, or On Institutional Time,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 739–56; Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017).
143. Laurence M. Porter, ed., A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 73.
144. Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture, 47.
1. SELF-HELP’S PORTABLE WISDOM
1. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Heidi Marie Rimke, “Governing Citizens Through Self-Help Literature,” Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2000): 61–78.
2. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein (New York: Routledge, 2002), 277–280, at 279.
3. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance [1859] (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877); Keiko Kockum, Ito Sei: Self-Analysis and the Modern Japanese Novel (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 1994), 102–3.
4. Patricia Neville, “Helping Self-Help Books: Working Towards a New Research Agenda,” Interactions Studies in Communications and Culture 3, no. 3 (2012): 372.
6. Jeffrey T. Kenney, “Selling Success, Nurturing the Self,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, no. 47 (2005): 665.
7. Sarah Knudson, “Crash Courses and Life Long Journeys: Modes of Reading Non-fiction Advice in a North American Audience,” Poetics 41, no. 3 (2013): 213.
8. Paul Lichterman, “Self-Help Reading as a Thin Culture,” Media, Culture & Society 14, no. 3 (1992): 426.
10. In transactional theory, Louise Rosenblatt employs the term efferent reading describes how “the reader’s attention is primarily focused on what will remain as a residue after the reading—the information to be acquired, the logical solution to a problem, the actions to be carried out.” Louise Rosenblatt, “Efferent and Aesthetic Reading,” in The Reader, the Text, the Poem: A Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 23.
11. See a fascinating discussion of the rise of African do-it-yourself literacy in Karin Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); for a discussion on the effect of the Islamic revolution on the demand for self-help, see Moaveni, “Seeking Signs of Literary Life in Iran”; to explore the complex status of Western self-help in post-Soviet Russia, see Suvi Salmenniemi and Mariya Vorona, “Reading Self-Help Literature in Russia: Governmentality, Psychology, Subjectivity,” The British Journal of Sociology 65, no. 1 (January 2014): 44, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12039; for more on how the work of translating important Western texts into Japanese was given urgency by Japan’s 1858 signing of treaties with the United States, Holland, and other Western powers, see Douglas Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 62; for an explanation of the economic upheavals leading to the self-help boom in China, see Daniel Nehring, Emmanuel Alvarado, Eric C. Hendriks, and Dylan Kerrigan, Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 55.
12. I use this term in the sense employed by Bhabha when he describes Bibles as “objets trouvés of the colonial discourse.” Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 131.
13. Smiles, Self-Help, xi.
14. Benjamin C. Duke, The History of Modern Japanese Education: Constructing the National School System (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 141.
15. Samuel Smiles and Thomas Mackay. The Autobiography of Samuel Smiles [1905] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 229.
16. Smiles, Self-Help, 28.
17. R. H. Jarrett, It Works [1926] (Camarillo, Calif.: DeVorss, 2000).
18. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 68.
19. Vladimir Trendafilov, “The Origins of Self-Help: Samuel Smiles and the Formative Influences on an Ex-Seminal Work,” The Victorian 3, no. 1 (2015): 4.
20. John Hunter, The Spirit of Self-Help: A Life of Samuel Smiles (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2017), 37.
21. Trendafilov, “The Origins of Self-Help,” 11.
22. See Jerome Meckier, “‘Great Expectations’ and ‘Self-Help’: Dickens Frowns on Smiles,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 100, no.4 (October 2001): 537.
23. Smiles, Self-Help, vi, vii.
24. Meckier, “‘Great Expectations’” and ‘Self-Help’. 538, 541.
25. Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–67 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955), 118.
26. H. G. Wells, “The Jilting of Jane,” Pall Mall Budge, July 12, 1894.
27. Hunter, The Spirit of Self-Help, 3–4.
28. Smiles, quoted in Hunter, 38.
29. David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015); Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009); Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
30. Warren Susman, Culture as History: the Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 273–74.
31. Alison Booth, “Neo-Victorian Self-Help, or Cider House Rules,” American Literary History 14, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 284–285.
32. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 123.
33. Samuel Smiles, The Autobiography of Samuel Smiles (New York: Dutton, 1905), 29.
34. Hunter, The Spirit of Self-Help, 38–40, 176.
35. Smiles, Self-Help, 121–22.
36. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 23.
37. Smiles, Self-Help, 40.
38. Keith Joseph, introduction to Self-Help, by Samuel Smiles, rev. ed. (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1986).
39. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 69.
41. Quoted in John Dunn, “Nnamdi Azikiwe’s My Odyssey: An Autobiography” (review), The Spectator 226 (May 8, 1971): 634.
42. Quoted in Cyrus Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 186.
43. Sukehiro Hirakawa, Japan’s Love-Hate Relation with the West (Leiden, NL: Global Oriental, Brill, 2004), 43.
44. Jirjī Zaydān and Thomas Philipp, The Autobiography of Jurji Zaidan: Including Four Letters to His Son (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1990), 45.
45. Matti Mooosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1997), 198.
46. Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 338.
47. Zaydān and Philipp, The Autobiography of Jurji Zaidan, 45.
48. Donald M. Reid, “Syrian Christians, the Rags-to-Riches Story, and Free Enterprise,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 1, no. 4 (October 1970): 358–67, at 359, 363.
49. Zaydān and Philipp, The Autobiography of Jurji Zaidan, 12.
50. Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: “How to Play the Game of Life” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 90–91, 43.
51. Smiles, Self-Help, 366.
52. Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, 90.
53. Leah Price, “When Doctors Prescribe Books to Heal the Mind,” Boston Globe, December 22, 2013.
54. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas, 3rd ed. (London: A. Deutsch, 1984), 153, 71.
55. Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1975), 30.
56. Nehring, Alvarado, Hendriks, and Kerrigan, Transnational Popular Psychology, 143.
57. Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, 90.
59. Orison Swett Marden, Pushing to the Front or Success Under Difficulties (New York: The Success Company, 1911); Orison Swett Marden, The Conquest of Worry (New York: Crowell, 1924).
61. Steven Watts, Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America (New York: Other Press, 2013), 131, 142.
62. Dwight Macdonald, “Howtoism,” The New Yorker, May 22, 1954, 85.
63. Nehring Alvarado, Hendriks, and Kerrigan, Transnational Popular Psychology, 5.
64. Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987 (London: Heinemann, 1988), 69.
65. Stephanie Newell, ed., introduction to Readings in African Popular Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 2.
66. Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” 73.
67. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 171.
68. Jed Esty, “The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe,” Victorian Studies 49, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 407–30; Tsitsi Jaji, “Cassava Westerns: Theorizing the Pleasures of Playing the Outlaw in Africa,” The Western in the Global South, ed. MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz (New York: Routledge, 2015), 24–41.
69. Dipesh Chakrabarty, foreword to The Ambiguous Allure of the West: The Colonial in Thailand, ed. Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), xv.
70. Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories, 7, 5.
71. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” Kunapipi 9, no. 3 (1987): 17–34.
72. Chinua Achebe, Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 85.
73. The term brochure masterpiece is from a description of the pamphlets in Ryszard Kapuscinsk, The Shadow in the Sun, trans. Klara Gloweczewska (Toronto, Canada: Vintage Canada, 2002), 300.
74. Ulli Beier, quoted in Kurtz Thometz, introduction to Life Turns Man Up and Down: Highlife, Useful Advice, and Mad English (New York: Pantheon, 2001), xix.
75. Sunday Okenwa Olisah, “No Condition Is Permanent by the Master of Life.” (Fegge-Onitsha: Njoku & Sone, Umeh Brothers Press, 1964) in Life Turns Man Up and Down: Highlife, Useful Advice, and Mad English, ed. Kurtz Thomez (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 81, 100.
76. Frank E. Odili, “What Is Life?” (Onitsha: N. Njoku & Sons, 1961) in Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English: African Market Literature, ed. Kurt Thometz (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 321.
77. Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1993), 267.
78. Emmanuel N. Obiechina, An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 21–22.
79. Sunday Okenwa Olisah, “Money Hard to Get but Easy to Spend,” (Onitsha, Nigeria: J.O. Nnadozie, New Era Press, 1965), in Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English: African Market Literature, ed. Kurt Thometz (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 107–130, at 110; Olisah, “No Condition is Permanent,” 77–103, at 92.
80. Donatus Nwoga, “Onitsha Market Literature,” in Readings in African Popular Fiction, ed. Stephanie Newell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 42.
81. Chris Abani, GraceLand (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 112.
82. Abani, GraceLand, 112.
83. Abani, acknowledgments in GraceLand, endpapers.
84. For an example of this Joycean flair, Strausbaugh cites the opening of the pulp romance Rosemary and the Taxi Driver: “The sun flickered over her canonball head, with the hairs on her forehead, heightened like onboard type of shaving. She resoluted to follow the train at the earliest declining hour of the day.” John Strausbaugh, “High Life and Mad English” (review), New Yorker Press, November 24–December 4, 2001, 14, 48.
85. As Thometz suggestively notes, it is particularly remarkable that both pieces were produced in the same year, 1962. Kurt Thometz, ed., introduction to Life Turns Man Up and Down, xxxv.
86. Édouard Glissant, L’Imaginaire des Langues: Entretiens avec Lise Gauvin (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 16.
87. Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Wendy Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1992), 47.
88. Suvi Salmenniemi and Mariya Vorona, “Reading Self-Help Literature in Russia: Governmentality, Psychology and Subjectivity,” The British Journal of Sociology 65, no. 1 (2014): 46, 53.
89. Fariba Adelkhah, Being Modern in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 155.
90. Laura Miller, “There’s More Than Manga: Popular Nonfiction Books and Magazines,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, ed. Jennifer Robertson (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 316, 323, 317.
91. Earl H. Kinmonth, “Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles: A Victorian Confucian and a Confucian Victorian,” The American Historical Review 85, no. 3 (June 1980): 535–556, at 541.
92. Hirakawa, Japan’s Love-Hate Relation with the West, 103, 102.
93. Hirakawa, Japan’s Love-Hate Relation with the West, 107.
94. Kinmonth, “Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles,” 543.
95. See Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
96. Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization (Weatherhill, 1987), 120, as cited in Brooklyn Museum search catalog.
97. Kinmonth, “Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles,” 552,
99. Kinmonth, 546–547, 544; Hirakawa, Japan’s Love-Hate Relation with the West, 108.
100. See Toyoda Minoru, Shakespeare in Japan: An Historical Survey (Shakespeare Association of Japan by the Iwanami Shoten, 1940), 32; Friederike von Schwerin, High Shakespeare, Reception and Translation: Germany and Japan (New York: Continuum Press, 2004), 60.
101. Kishi and Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan, 2–3.
102. As Kockum writes, “a close examination of the works translated into Japanese … shows that the writers mentioned by Smiles predominate. Furthermore, popular and important contemporary writers who were not mentioned by Smiles remained untranslated into Japanese, even if their books were to be found in Japan.” Kockum, Ito Sei: Self-Analysis and the Modern Japanese Novel, 103.
103. Kinmonth, “Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles,” 556.
104. Hirakawa, Japan’s Love-Hate Relation with the West, 112–13.
105. Kiri Paramore, Japanese Confucianism: A Spiritual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 134–35.
106. Eric Hayot, “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matthew Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 153.
107. Michael Korda, Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900–1999: As Seen Through the Annual Bestseller Lists of Publishers Weekly (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001), 71–72.
108. Qian Suoqiao, “Liberal Cosmopolitanism: Lin Yu Tang and Middling Chinese Modernity,” in Ideas, History, and Modern China, vol. 3, ed. Ban Wang, Wang Hui, and Geremie Barmé (Boston: Brill, 2011), 161.
109. Quoted in Suoqiao, “Liberal Cosmopolitan,” 176.
110. Quoted in Suoqiao, 176.
111. Quoted in Suoqiao, 178.
112. See Eric C. Hendriks, “China’s Self-Help Industry: American(ized) Life Advice in China,” chap. 22 in Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in China, ed. Michael Keane (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2016), 311–328; Nehring, Alvarado, Hendriks, and Kerrigan, Transnational Popular Psychology; Yuebai Liu, “When Self-Help Becomes a Group Activity,” Slate, April 1, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2016/04/one_woman_s_foray_into_china _s_self_help_culture.html.
113. Nehring, Alvarado, Hendriks, and Kerrigan, Transnational Popular Psychology, 64.
114. Hendriks, “China’s Self-Help Industry,” 312.
115. David Weir, American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 21, 22.
116. Quoted in Weir, American Orient, 21.
118. Feng Lan, quoted in Weir, 134.
119. D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin, 1923). In a literal instance of modernism rewriting self-help, Lawrence transcribed Franklin’s list of virtues and then inserted his own definitions underneath as rebuttals. On page 23, under “Industry,” Franklin originally writes, “Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” Lawrence changes it to “Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost, never serve mankind.”
120. Weir, American Orient, 135, 256.
121. Gregory K. Ornatowski, “On the Boundary Between ‘Religious’ and ‘Secular’: The Ideal and Practice of Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation in Modern Japanese Economic Life, “Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 25, nos. 3–4 (Fall 1998): 371.
123. Nehring, Alvarado, Hendriks, and Kerrigan, Transnational Popular Psychology, 13.
124. I am indebted to my former student and research assistant Siqi Liu for translations of Aw’s work and her brilliant analysis of the phenomenon in her two-part final paper for my seminar. Liu translated the sentences from Aw for me and researched their provenance. Siqi Liu, “The Phenomenon of Western Advice in Modern-Day China” and “Translation and Self-Help in Five Star Billionaire,” Harvard 90HL seminar, “How to Live: When Literature Meets Self-Help” (Fall 2016). Thanks also to Han Zhang for her additional research into the translations.
125. Qian Suoqiao refers to “recycled Orientalism” in describing the strange process by which Yutang’s American translations of Chinese folk wisdom were, after their American popularity had waned in the 1950s, retranslated literally back into Chinese. Suoqiao, “Liberal Cosmopolitanism,” 196.
126. Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire (New York: Speigel & Grau, 2013), xii.
127. Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 61.
129. Aw, 72, 196, 139, 97.
133. Hunter, The Spirit of Self-Help, 178.
134. Neville, “Helping Self-Help Books,” 370.
136. Dale Carnegie, The Illustrated New Translation: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living [Japanese title]: The Road Will Open Up Before You (Michi wa hirakeru), trans. Shimon Tauchi, ed. Foreign Masterpieces Research Group [Kaigai meicho kenkyūkai] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Books, 2015). My thanks to Kimberlee Sanders for her assistance with translations of the book’s captions.
137. Marie Kondo and Yuka Uramoto, The Life Changing Manga of Tidying Up, trans. Cathy Hirano (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 2017).
138. Perhaps it is due to this homology between visual and emotional containment that Nathanael West initially envisioned his story about the commercial advice industry, Miss Lonelyhearts (the subject of chapter 5), as a comic strip: “The chapters to be squares in which many things happen through one action. The speeches contained in conventional balloons. I abandoned this idea but retained some of the comic strip technique …”. Nathanael West, “Some Notes on Miss L.,” in Nathaniel West: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jay Martin (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall Spectrum, 1971), 66.
139. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4.
140. Carol Pateman, The Patriarchal State in Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); for more on this see David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 6.
141. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State; Amanda Anderson, “The Liberal Aesthetic,” in Theory After ‘Theory’, ed. Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 2011), 249–62; Thomas, Cultivating Victorians, x.
2. BOUVARD AND PÉCUCHET: FLAUBERT’S DIY DYSTOPIA
1. John Hunter, The Spirit of Self-Help: A Life of Samuel Smiles (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2017), 107.
2. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London: Ward Lock, 1850), x.
3. J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living 1790–1960: A Study in the History of the English Adult Education Movement (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 10–11, 55.
4. Harrison, Learning and Living 1790–1960, 54.
5. Theodor Adorno, “Free Time,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 187–97, at 194.
6. Frances Ferguson, “Too Much Information: Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet,” Modern Language Notes 125 (2010): 783.
7. Laurence M. Porter, ed., A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 73; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 81; Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 130.
8. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondence, ed. Louis Conard (Paris, 1923), III: 67.
9. One exception to the critical reticence is Mary Orr, who notes that “BP is the ironic fictional version of a potted self-help series (encyclopedia or compendium) on every topic known to man.” Mary Orr, Flaubert: Writing the Masculine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119. Orr’s aside notwithstanding, self-help’s status as a target of Flaubert’s prescient wrath has not been fully addressed.
10. Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 79. See Booth, 77–80, for an excellent discussion of the role of biography and “role models” in Smiles’s self-help.
11. Quoted in Harrison, Learning and Living 1790–1960, 56.
12. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), 14, 37.
13. For a detailed account of the specific manuals Flaubert consulted, see Stéphanie Dord Crouslé, “Flaubert et les Manuels Roret ou le paradoxe de la vulgarization: L’art des jardins dans Bouvard et Pécuchet,” Le partage des savoirs (18th–19th siècles), ed. Lise Andries (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2003), 93–118.
14. Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 132.
15. Harrison, Learning and Living 1790–1960: A Study in the History of the English Adult Education Movement, 51.
16. Although Smiles was inspired in his lectures by local Scottish improvement clubs, remember that he modeled much of his written handbook on French precedents.
17. Charles Louandré, “De l’Association littéraire et scientifique en France: Les societies savants et littéraires de la province,” Revue des deux mondes (1846): 528, 521. (Translations of this text are my own.)
18. M. A. Kirchner, archiviste, “Table Générale Récapitulative,” in Mémoires de la Société D’Émulation du Doubs, 1841–1905 (Besancon: Typographie et Lithographie Dodivers, 1907) 2, 41, 39, 12, 12. (Translations are my own.)
19. Robert Fox, “The Savant Confronts His Peers: Scientific Societies in France, 1815–1914” in The Organization of Science and Technology in France 1808–1914, ed. Robert Fox and George Weisz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 257; Carol Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79.
20. Fox, “The Savant Confronts His Peers,” 243.
21. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 250.
22. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 186, 358, 357.
23. Fox, “The Savant Confronts His Peers,” 244.
24. Gustave Flaubert, “On doit toujours faire partie d’un cercle.” See The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, trans. Jacques Barzun (New York: New Directions, 1968), 24.
25. Robert Fox, “The Savant Confronts His Peers,” 241.
26. Carol Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France, 2–3.
27. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 355–356.
28. Flaubert, Madame Bovary 225.
29. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2006), 17.
30. Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 197.
31. There is no direct record of Flaubert having said this phrase, only third-hand reporting of his having said it. See Rene Descharmes, Flaubert. Sa vie, son caractère et ses idées avant 1857 (Ferroud, 1909), 103.
32. “Combien je regrette souvent de n’être pas un savant, et comme j’envie ces calmes existences passées à étudier des pattes de mouche, des étoiles ou des fleurs!” Gustave Flaubert, Lettre à Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, March 1, 1858, in Oeuvres Complètes de Gustave Flaubert, Vol. 10, Correspondence II (1850–1859) (Paris: Club de l’honnête homme, 1974–1976).
33. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 137–138.
34. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 106, 118.
35. Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 18; Steve Salerno, SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (New York: Crown, 2005), 6.
36. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 194.
37. Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xx.
38. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology [1932] (New York: International Publishers, 2004), 105.
39. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 48.
42. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 118.
45. This episode is described and quoted in Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France, 49–50.
46. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 55, 59.
47. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet 61.
48. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet 65.
49. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 355.
50. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 21.
51. In Sentimental Education, Frédéric “thought of the plot of a play and of subjects for paintings,” “dreamt of symphonies,” “wanted to paint,” and attempts “to write a novel called Sylvio, A Fisherman’s Son, etc.” Assembled in Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 5.
52. Claudine Cohen, “Bouvard et Pécuchet réécrivent les sciences,” Alliage 37–38 (1998): 2. (My translation).
53. Flaubert, quoted in Mark Polizzotti “Introduction,” Bouvard and Pécuchet, xxxi–xxxii.
54. Mark Polizzotti, “Introduction” to Bouvard and Pecuchet, ix–x.
55. Charles Louandre, “De l’association littéraire et scientifique en france. I. Les Sociétéssavantes et littéraires de Paris,” Revue des deux mondes, vol. 16 (Paris: 1846), 522.
56. Cohen, “Bouvard et Pécuchet réécrivent les sciences,” 3.
57. Larry Duffy, Flaubert, Zola, and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 218.
58. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 37, 38.
60. Pierre Boitard, Manuel de L’Architecte des Jardins: L’art de les composer et de les décorer, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez Leonce Laget, 1846), 35. (My translations). On Flaubert’s use of Boitard, see Stéphanie Dord Crouslé, “Flaubert et les Manuels Roret ou le paradoxe de la vulgarization” 101.
61. Boitard, Manuel de L’Architecte des Jardins, 38.
62. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, 44, 45–47.
63. Boitard, Manuel de L’Architecte des Jardins, 36.
65. Flaubert had largely completed the Dictionary by 1850, prior to beginning Bouvard and Pécuchet. From his letters and notes, it seems he may have planned for the Dictionary to compose an entire second volume to Bouvard and Pécuchet, “consisting almost entirely of quotations” (Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857, 263). He died, however, before the volume was complete, leaving the much shorter appendix that is often published with Bouvard and Pécuchet today.
66. Gustave Flaubert, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, trans. Jacques Barzun (New York: New Directions, 1968), 68, 66–67.
67. Flaubert, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, 64, 80, 92.
68. Jacques Barzun, “Introduction,” Flaubert, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, 8.
69. Flaubert, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, 17.
71. Gustave Flaubert, quoted in Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et cie, 1922), 136.
72. Flaubert, Oeuvres Complètes de Gustave Flaubert, 99.
73. We know from his letters that Flaubert read Kant. See Aimee L. McKenzie, trans., The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921), 248; see also Francis Steegmuller, ed., The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1857–1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982), 248.
74. “Of all these three kinds of satisfaction [the pleasant, the good, the beautiful], that of taste in the beautiful is alone a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of interest or reason, here forces our assent.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (New York: Hafner, 1951), 44.
75. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 6.
76. Lorrie Moore, “How to Be an Other Woman,” in Self-Help: Stories (New York: Knopf, 1985), 4.
77. Jonathan Holden, “The Abuse of the Second Person Pronoun,” in The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 38–56.
79. Brian Richardson, “The Poetics and Politics of Second-Person Narration,” Genre 24 (Fall 1991): 327.
80. Richardson, “The Poetics and Politics of Second-Person Narration,” 319.
81. Matt Del Conte, “Why You Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice, and a New Model for Understanding Narrative,” Style 37, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 216, n4.
82. Richardson, “The Poetics and Politics of Second-Person Narration,” 313.
83. James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 153, 148.
84. Jessica Anne, A Manual for Nothing (Noemi Press, 2017).
85. Mark McGurl, The Program Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
3. NEGATIVE VISUALIZATION
1. Marshall McLuhan, “Dale Carnegie: America’s Machiavelli” (“Dale Carnegie’s Moral Arithmetic”), 1939, manuscripts, vol. 128, file 2, Marshall McLuhan Archives, National Archives of Canada, 1, 13–14, 2.
2. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, rev. ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 1982), 37 (in original).
3. Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (New York: United Nations, 1987), 37.
4. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
7. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978); Jakob Norberg, “Adorno’s Advice: Minima Moralia and the Critique of Liberalism,” PMLA, 126, no. 2 (March 2011): 404.
8. Norberg, “Adorno’s Advice,” 408, 400.
9. Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–82, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
10. Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, trans. Wieland Hoban (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2013), 452. For more on this, see Quinn, 79–80.
11. Oliver Burkeman, Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), 207.
12. Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2017), 407.
13. Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 2014).
14. Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman: A Novel (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999), 29, 30.
15. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 29.
16. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
17. Flann O’Brien, epigraph to The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
18. Émile Coué, Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (New York: Malkan, 1922), 18.
19. Coué, Self Mastery, 25 (italics in original).
20. O’Brien, The Hard Life, 127–28.
22. Stephanie Rains, “‘Do You Ring? Or Are You Rung For?’: Mass Media, Class, and Social Aspiration in Edwardian Ireland,” New Hibernian Review 18, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 26. Rains offers a fascinating discussion of the ambitions and anxieties of the Irish clerkly classes at this time.
23. Sidney Flower, The Mail-Order Business: A Series of Lessons (Chicago: S. Flower, 1902), 40–41.
25. O’Brien, The Hard Life, 125–26.
26. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (New York: Penguin, 2005), 148.
27. O’Brien, The Hard Life, 166.
28. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York: Vintage International, 1996), 353.
29. Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), 15.
30. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 93, 144, 146.
33. Leo Tolstoy, “Modern Science” (1898), in Essays and Letters by Count Leo Tolstoy, trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1904), 223.
34. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 3.
35. James Joyce, Ulysses, The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986), 2:239.
36. Philip Coulter, “A Critical Study of Flann O’Brien’s Early Novels” (master of arts thesis, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, July 28, 1971), 83.
37. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 159.
38. Hugh Kenner, “The Fourth Policeman,” in Conjuring Complexities: Essays on Flann O’Brien, ed. Anne Clune and Tess Hurson (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997), 71.
39. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 162.
41. See Seneca, “On the Happy Life,” in Dialogues and Essays, ed. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87.
43. Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep [1927] (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
44. Robin Peel, Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, Fiction (New York: Rosemont, 2005).
45. Wharton, Twilight Sleep, 119.
46. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [1925] (New York: Scribner, 2004), 173.
47. Wharton, 9–10, 45, 14.
48. Aldous Huxley, “Hocus Pocus,” in Aldous Huxley’s Hearst Essays, ed. James Sexton (New York: Garland, 1994), 78,
49. Aldous Huxley, “Hocus Pocus,” 78.
50. For example, see Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83–110.
51. Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
52. William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” in Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987).
53. Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jonathan Goldman, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin University of Texas Press, 2011).
54. See Hugh Kenner, “In Defense of a Guru” (review of James Moore’s Gurdjieff and Mansfield), New York Times, January 25, 1981.
55. Virginia Woolf writes of the incident in Roger Fry: A Biography (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1940), where Fry describes Coué as “a kind of secular Jesus Christ.” Woolf notes that his time with Coué inspired Fry’s aesthetic interest in primitivism:
At first it seemed impossible for Fry to be anything but a detached and sympathetic spectator. “It’s terribly difficult for people with so external and analytic a mind as I have to submit,” he wrote. For six hours a day he sat on a camp stool repeating “Ca passé” [Coué’s motto] and tried to realize that his skepticism was merely “instinctive and irrational.” At last the charm began to work. His pain left him, and he went on to develop a theory of the unconscious, and that theory was, of course, brought to bear upon art. The séances at Nancy had their share in developing his growing interest in uncivilized races.
56. For example, see Janet Beer and Avril Horner, “Wharton the ‘Renovator’: Twilight Sleep as Gothic Satire,” The Yearbook of English Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 177–92.
57. Quoted in Rebecca Rauve, “An Intersection of Interests: Gurdjieff’s Rope Group as a Site of Literary Production,” in “American Writers and France,” special issue, Twentieth Century Literature 49, no. 1 (2003): 46–81, at 59.
58. The name “Rope Group” referred to Gurdjieff’s allegory that a work group must be “like climbing a high mountain. For safety, each must be roped together, each one thinking of the others, all helping one another ‘as hand washes hand’. ” William Patrick Patterson, Ladies of the Rope: Gurdjieff’s Special Left Bank Women’s Group (Berkeley, Calif.: Arete Communications, 1999), 96.
59. John Bennet, Gurdjieff: Making a New World (London: Turnstone, 1973), 273.
60. Margaret Anderson, The Unknowable Gurdjieff (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1962), 53.
61. Wharton, on Woolfian stream of consciousness, is quoted in Dale M. Bauer, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 44; Wharton on Joyce in a letter to Bernard Berenson, January 6, 1923, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribners, 1989), 461.
62. Edith Wharton, “Tendencies in Modern Fiction,” The Saturday Review of Literature 10, no. 28 (January 27, 1934): 434.
63. Wharton “confessed to liking James the individual more than his later books.” Quoted in Peel, Apart from Modernism, 17.
64. Wharton, “Tendencies in Modern Fiction,” 434.
65. Rauve, “An Intersection of Interests,” 49.
66. Wharton quoted in Peel, Apart from Modernism, 89.
67. Kathryn Hulme, Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 1.
68. For a lengthy discussion of the Rope Group output, see Rauve, “An Intersection of Interests,” 46.
69. Pound preferred Gurdjieff’s soup to his philosophy, joking that “if he had more of that sort of thing in his [culinary] repertoire he could … have worked on towards at least one further conversation.” Lewis described the guru as a “Levantine psychic shark,” and Yeats advised his friend, “I have had a lot of experience of that sort of thing in my time, and my advice to you is—leave it alone.” Quoted in Rauve, “An Intersection of Interests,” 57.
70. Quoted in Tobin Siebers, Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 53.
71. Siebers, Cold War Criticism, 53, 52–53, 53.
72. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21; Rita Feslki, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
73. Siebers, Cold War Criticism, 5.
74. Frank Channing Haddock, The Power of Will (Auburndale: Power-Book Library, 1909); Annie Payson Call, Nerves and Common Sense (Boston: Little, Brown, 1925); Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936). Richardson relates that “[Annie Payson Call’s] popular self-help books would be based on James’s views about the power of habit. James, in turn, learned much about the importance of relaxation—muscular relaxation—from Call’s work.” Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: First Mariner Books, 2007), 283.
75. Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012); Neel Burton, The Art of Failure: The Anti-Self-Help Guide (Chatham: Acheron Press, 2010).
76. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1918), 125. Speaking of this passage, Posnock notes that “it is difficult not to detect in this description a caricature of Henry.” Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 64.
77. William James letter to Henry James, October 22, 1905; Henry James to William James, November 23, 1905, in William and Henry James Selected Letters, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 463, 467.
78. Henry James letter to Grace Norton, July 28, 1883, in Henry James Letters, vol. 2, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 424.
79. Steven Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989), 34.
80. Henry James, “The Jolly Corner,” in The New York Stories of Henry James (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 463–500, at 473.
81. William James, The Energies of Men (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1914), 8. Energies was originally delivered as a Presidential Address at Columbia University in 1906 and was first published in 1907 under the title “The Powers of Men.”
82. W. James, The Energies of Men, 14–15.
83. Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, 17.
84. W. James, The Energies of Men, 15, 5.
85. W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 92.
86. Michel Foucault, “How We Behave: Sex, Food, and Other Ethical Matters,” Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (interview), Vanity Fair 46, no. 9 (1983): 61–69; Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth (London: Routledge, 1994).
87. W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 104–5.
88. Orison Swett Marden, How to Get What You Want (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1917), 10–11.
89. H. James, “The Jolly Corner,” 474.
90. Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34.
91. H. James, “The Jolly Corner,” 473, 467.
92. Bruce MacLelland, Prosperity Through Thought Force [1907] (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 31, 25.
93. Frank Channing Haddock, Power of Will: A Practical Companion Book for Unfoldment of the Powers of Mind (New York: J. F. Tapley, 1907), 9.
94. Henry James read Varieties in 1902, six years before “The Jolly Corner” was published. F. O. Mattheissen, The James Family (New York: Knopf, 1947), 338.
95. Henry Wood, Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography: A Restorative System for Home and Private Use (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1893), 108–9.
96. Steven Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989), 29.
97. H. James, “The Jolly Corner,” 486, 493.
98. Prentice Mulford, Thought Is a Thing (Radford: Wilder, 2008). Another important precedent for this scene within the context of self-help’s prehistory is the philosophy of Swedenborgism to which Henry James Senior subscribed. See R. W. B. Lewis, introduction to The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction (New York: Bantam Books, 2008), xx.
99. Sigmund Freud, “The Relation of the Poet to Day Dreaming” (1908), in Character and Culture (Springfield: Crowell-Collier, 1963), 37, 43.
100. In a suggestive essay, Cohen describes “talk” in late James as a form of “performative self-help.” Paula Marantz Cohen, “Henry James and Self-Help,” in Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 145–52, at 149.
101. Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 188; Eric Savoy, “The Queer Subject of ‘The Jolly Corner,’” Henry James Review 20, no. 1 (1999): 1–21, at 1, 3. An alternate approach to the self-help capacities of James’s writing is found in Carroll’s “evolutionary criticism,” which argues that James inherits the Arnoldian view of the literary as “a heroic pursuit leading ultimately to ‘perfection’. ” Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 196.
102. Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005).
103. The New Thought Alliance was established in London in 1914. See Horatio W. Dresser, A History of the New Thought Movement (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1919), 263; Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (Luxembourg: Atria Books, 2006).
104. Quoted in Matthew Peters, “Henry James, American Social Change, and Literary Revision,” The Cambridge Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2005): 323–31, at 323.
105. Henry James, The American Scene, in Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America (New York: Library of America, 1993), 734.
106. H. James, “The Jolly Corner,” 475.
107. Squillace offers a fascinating assessment of Bennett’s self-help and its often conflicted relation to his fiction. Robert Squillace, “Arnold Bennett’s Other Selves,” in Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 156–183, at 157.
108. Arnold Bennett, How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (New York: Bookman, 1910); Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It (New York: George H. Doran, 1909); Arnold Bennett, Mental Efficiency (New York: George H. Doran, 1911); Arnold Bennett, The Human Machine (London: New Age Press, 1908); Arnold Bennett, Self and Self-Management (New York: W. M. H. Wise, 1918); Arnold Bennett, How to Make the Best of Life (New York: George H. Doran, 1923).
109. Endpapers promotional blurb for How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, The Bristol Daily Mercury, repr. in Arnold Bennett, The Human Machine (London: New Age Press, 1908).
110. William James’s readings of Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius is described in Richardson, William James, 53.
111. Arnold Bennett, quoted in James Hepburn, Arnold Bennett: The Critical Heritage (1971; repr. London: Routledge, 1997), 43.
112. Arnold Bennett, The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett, ed. Samuel Hynes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 264.
113. James Hepburn, ed., Arnold Bennett (New York: Routledge, 2013), 43.
114. Bennett, How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, 16.
116. W. Whitten, endpapers promotional blurb for How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, The Tattler, repr. in Bennett, The Human Machine; William James, The Energies of Men (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1926), 8–9.
117. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1930), 181.
118. Arnold Bennett, “Young Authors,” in The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett, 218–220, at 219; Arnold Bennett, “James Joyce’s Ulysses,” in The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett, 211–217, at 215.
119. Arnold Bennett, “Translating Literature into Life,” Things That Have Interested Me (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921), 42–45, at 42.
120. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” [1924] in The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 1984), 192–212, at 194.
121. Samuel Smiles, Character (New York: Harper, 1876); William James, Habit (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 61; Bennett, The Human Machine, 34.
122. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 195.
123. Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Virginia Woolf and the Public Sphere,” in Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed., ed. Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 231–49, at 199, 203. Keane further writes that “modeling discourse is, for Woolf, intervention in the public sphere,” 238.
124. Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”, [1926] in The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1986), 258–70, at 258.
125. The dialogic possibilities afforded Woolf by the essay form, in contrast to the novel, are even more marked when considering the opposition between the essay and the self-help tract. On Woolf’s essayistic style, see Randi Saloman, Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
126. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, 2nd ed., ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985), 61–160, at 77.
127. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1981), 21–22.
128. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 84.
129. E. F. Garasché, quoted in William K. Beatty, “A Historical Review of Bibliotherapy,” Library Trends 11, no. 2 (1962): 106–117, at 107.
130. The Woolf quotes are from Mrs. Dalloway, 67, 24, and 66. William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909). Similarly, in Nightwood, the sole moral voice is the schizophrenic doctor Matthew O’Connor, who sputters out his insights like a record on a loop. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 2006), 35.
131. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 170.
132. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1977), 126.
133. Virginia Woolf, “Craftsmanship,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 1970), 198–207, at 206.
134. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bennett is the working-class “hero” of John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 1992); whereas “class-conscious disapproval” is implicit in Woolf’s critique of him. Samuel Hynes, “The Whole Contention Between Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 1, no. 1 (1967): 34–44, at 37. For an example of a feminist reading, see Beth Rigel Daugherty, “The Whole Contention Between Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf, Revisited,” in Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb (Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1983), 269–94.
135. F. R. Leavis notoriously relied upon the rather elusive notion of an author’s “life-impulsion” in his literary criticism. See, for example, F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York: Knopf, 1956), 298.
136. Edwin J. Kenney Jr., “The Moment, 1910: Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, and Turn of the Century Consciousness,” Colby Library Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1977): 42.
137. Arnold Bennett, “Another Criticism of the New School,” in Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years, “Books and Persons” 1921–1931, ed. Andrew Mylett (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974), 4–6, at 5.
138. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 1984), 283–92, at 286–87.
139. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 10.
140. Arnold Bennett: The Savour of Life: Essays in Gusto (London: Cassell, 1928). As the Times Literary Supplement commented in a review on September 15, 1910, “Towards the end of ‘Clayhanger’ a phrase occurs that seems to reveal as with a flashlight the whole impulse and motive of Mr. Arnold Bennett’s prodigious novel—‘a terrific zest for life’. ”Quoted in Hepburn, Arnold Bennett, 244.
141. Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger (London: Eyre Methuen, 1910), 530.
142. Abraham Myerson, When Life Loses Its Zest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1925).
143. Myerson, When Life Loses Its Zest, xiv. Myerson quotes and cites William James approvingly throughout his book.
144. Myerson recommended Benzedrine for anhedonic depressives as well as “normal people with morning hangovers and low moods.” Nicolas Rasmussen, “Making the First Anti-Depressant: Amphetamine in American Medicine, 1929–1950,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61, no. 3 (2006): 288–323, at 309.
145. For an engaging analysis of the overlap between American modern poetry and self-help, see Matt Sandler, “A Poetics of Self-Help in America” (PhD dissertation Columbia University, 2009).
146. Victor A. Segno, The Law of Mentalism: A Practical, Scientific Explanation of Thought or Mind Force: The Law Which Governs All Mental and Physical Action and Phenomena: The Cause of Life and Death (Los Angeles: American Institute of Mentalism, 1902), 23. According to the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, Segno was born in Ontario, Canada, as William Albert Hall. He ran a lucrative operation as the founder of the “Segno School of Success” in Los Angeles until he was forced to flee the persecution of the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Division, which was investigating him for mail-order fraud. Segno published volumes such as How to Live 100 Years (1903) and The Secret of Memory (1906), only to disappear from the public record in 1915. See http://www.iapsop.com/archive/materials/segnogram/; see also http://ehbritten.blogspot.com/2016/02/out-of-nowhere-some-notes-on-victor.html.
147. Prentice Mulford, “How Thoughts Are Born,” Your Forces, and How to Use Them (New York: F. J. Needham, 1888), 1.
148. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 30, 39, 139.
149. Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 279.
150. See John S. Rickard, Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 22–23; Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (London: Penguin, 2002), 51.
151. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 116.
152. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), 11.
153. Toby Avard Foshay, Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics of the Intellect (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 91.
154. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), 16.
155. Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World (New York: Doubleday, 2016); Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black (New York: HarperCollins, 2012); Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman (London: Ebury, 2011).
156. When Macdonald wrote about the spread of “howto” books in 1954, he argued that such works are, “to say the least, supererogatory.” “Do we really need, for instance, Dorothea Biddle’s and Dorothea Bom’s ‘Christmas Idea Book?’—two hundred and twenty-one pages about Christmas decorations,” or Dorothea F. Sullivan’s “How to Attend a Conference”? Dwight Macdonald, “Howtoism” The New Yorker, May 22, 1954, 85.
157. Wyndham Lewis, “The Revolutionary Simpleton,” in The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature: January 1927–First Quarter 1929, 3 vols. (London: Frank Cass, 1927–1929, 1968), 109.
158. Ann Charters and Samuel Charters, Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation (repr. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 256.
159. Although too large and tangential a subject for the present monograph, this invocation of Eastern and New Age philosophy carries through to mid-century with the Beats. Victor Segno is even mentioned by the character Cody Pomeray in Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, which describes how when he was in the “joint” the assistant warden gave him “books like The Law of Mentalism, by Sechnal [sic].” Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), 228.
160. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 7.
161. Quoted in and trans. Mette Blok, “Robert Musil’s Literary Ethics: The Man Without Qualities Reconsidered,” New German Review 26, no. 1 (2014): 4.
162. Musil, The Man Without Qualities, 272.
4. JOYCE FOR LIFE
1. Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: Norton, 2009), 31, 11, 245, 31.
2. Joseph Kelly, “Saving Joyce from the Professors,” South Carolina Review 43, no. 1 (2010): 264.
3. Kiberd, Ulysses and Us, 258.
5. I use the term “common reader” because it is the phrase used by the modernists and their early critics, but I realize that it fails to adequately capture the diversity—or indeed the originality—of popular approaches to the literary text.
6. Charles Duff, James Joyce and the Plain Reader (London: Hammersworth, 1932); William Powell Jones, James Joyce and the Common Reader (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955); Anthony Burgess, Here Comes Everybody (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).
7. “Ulysses Lands,” Time, January 29, 1934.
8. Philip Kitcher, Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); see also Jefferson Hunter, How to Read Ulysses and Why (New York: Peter Lang, 2002); Arnold Weinstein, Recovering Your Story, Understanding the Self Through Five Great Modern Writers: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison (New York: Random House, 2006), 101.
9. Julie Sloan Brannon, Who Reads Ulysses?: The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2.
10. James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text (1922), ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986), 17.385–87.
11. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.389–91.
12. Joyce, Ulysses, 1.555–57.
13. Nicholas Howe, “The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England,” in The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 58–79, at 63.
14. In 1918, the nonfiction list was permanently established. See Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Bowker, 1946), 205.
15. Richard Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 1 (1997): 2, 12.
16. Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 172.
17. See, for example, Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000); “Ethics and Literary Study,” special issue, PMLA 114, no. 1 (January 1999). In fact, a great deal of recent scholarship enacts an ethical approach, from the Victorian studies scholarship of Amanda Anderson’s Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology (Clarendon Lectures in English Literture (Oxford, 2018) to the modernist and contemporary criticism of Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) and Robert Chodat’s The Matter of High Words: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Postwar Sage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
18. Brannon, Who Reads Ulysses?, xiii.
19. The argument for a “great divide” between modernism and mass culture was most famously advanced by Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmoderism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
20. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 146.
21. Jeffrey Segall, Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press,1993), 135.
22. Nash notes, “Nowhere in Joyce’s work is there a model of an ‘ideal reader’. ” John Nash, James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6.
23. Joyce complained, “The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.” Djuna Barnes, “A Portrait of the Man Who Is, at Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature,” Vanity Fair, April 1922, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1922/03/james-joyce-djuna-barnes-ulysses. Joyce describes his “ideal reader [as] suffering from an ideal insomnia.” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939; repr. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999), 120.13.
24. Friederike Von Schwerin-High, Shakespeare, Reception and Translation: Germany and Japan (New York: Continuum, 2004), 64. Even-Zohar describes the literary system as coexisting with other social systems, whether religious, legal, etc., which taken together constitute the polysystem.
25. Jennifer Wicke, “‘Who’s She When She’s at Home?’: Molly Bloom and the Work of Consumption,” in Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope,” ed. Richard Pearce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1994), 174–95, at 179.
26. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.1361–98. For discussions of the role of Sandow’s self-help text in Ulysses, see Brandon Kershner, “The World’s Strongest Man: Joyce or Sandow?”, in Images of Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Clive Hart, George C. Sandulescu, Bonnie Kime Scott, and Fritz Senn (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1998), 237–52; Vike Martina Plock, “A Feast of Strength in Ithaca,” Journal of Modern Literature 30, no. 1 (2006): 129–36.
27. Joyce, Ulysses, 11.906.
28. James Joyce, Occasional Critical and Politics Writings, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 97–98.
29. Joyce, Ulysses, 4.511–515.
30. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 83; John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 20.
31. Plock, “A Feast of Strength in Ithaca,” 135.
32. W. B. Yeats, “Letter to Florence Farr, July 19, 1905,” in Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 4, 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly (New York: Oxford, 2005), 134.
33. Kershner, “The World’s Strongest Man,” 246.
34. Joyce, Ulysses, 4.230–34.
36. Eugen Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It (London: Gale & Polden, 1897), 9.
37. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.2846–64.
38. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 205.
39. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.410.
40. Sarah Raff, “Quixotes, Precepts, and Galateas: The Didactic Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Comparative Literature Studies 43, no. 4 (2006): 466–81.
41. For a discussion of the morality tale The Lamplighter, which informs this episode, see Thomas Karr Richards, “Gerty MacDowell and the Irish Common Reader,” English Literary History 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 755–76.
42. Joyce, Ulysses, 18.1362–64, 16.1653, 17.672, 17.704.
44. Patrick A. McCarthy, “Reading in Ulysses,” in Joycean Occasions: Essays from the Milwaukee James Joyce Conference, ed. Janet E. Dunleavy, Melvin J. Friedman, and Michael Patrick Gillespie (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 19.
45. Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom and Destiny, trans. Alfred Suto (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1918), 32.
46. Joyce, Ulysses, 19.657, 10.609, 9.261.
47. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 174, 175.
48. Seamus Heaney, “A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on the Irish Literary Revival,” in Irish Studies, vol. 1, ed. P. J. Drudy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 72–87, at 72.
49. Malcolm Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), 370.
50. See, for instance, Lisi Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Liesl Olsen, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
51. For a discussion of the political significance of “self-help” to the Irish, see Kiberd, Ulysses and Us, 33.
52. Vike Martina Plock, “Modernism’s Feast on Science: Nutrition and Diet in Joyce’s Ulysses,” Literature & History 16, no. 2 (2007): 34.
53. P. J. Matthews, “‘A.E.I.O.U’: Joyce and the Irish Homestead,” in Joyce on the Threshold, ed. Anne Fogarty and Timothy Martin (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005), 151–168, at 153.
54. W. B. Yeats, “Dublin, Nov. 6, 1892,” in Letters to the New Island, ed. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 65.
55. John Logan, “Sufficient to Their Needs: Literary and Elementary Schooling in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language Change and Educational Development, 1700–1920, ed. Mary Daly and David Dickson (Dublin: Trinity College Press, 1990), 113–38, at 129.
56. W. B. Yeats, “Ireland After Parnell,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 3, “Autobiographies,” ed. William H. O’Donnel and Douglas N. Archibald (1922; repr. New York: Scribner, 1999), 172.
57. Yeats, “Ireland After Parnell,” 170, 186.
58. On Joyce’s use of the Taylor speech in Ulysses, see Damien Keane, “Quotation Marks, the Gramophone Record, and the Language of the Outlaw,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51, no. 4 (2009): 400–415.
59. P. J. Matthews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League, and the Cooperative Movement (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 15.
60. William Patrick Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival; Its History, Pioneers and Possibilities (London: Ward & Downey, 1894), 67.
61. Matthews, Revival, 16.
62. Ernest Augustus Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (New York: John Lane, 1916), 91.
63. W. B. Yeats, “Young Ireland,” in Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (1880–1883; repr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 34.
64. The full chronological list of New Irish Library publications includes Thomas Davis, The Patriot Parliament of 1689, ed. Charles Gavan Duffy (1893); Standish O’Grady, The Bog of Stars and Other Stories and Sketches of Elizabethan Ireland (1893); The New Spirit of the Nation, ed. Martin MacDermott (1894); E. M. Lynch, A Parish Providence: A Country Tale, with an introduction by Charles Gavan Duffy (1894); The Irish Song Book, ed. Alfred Perceval Graves (1894); Douglas Hyde, The Story of Early Gaelic Literature (1895); John Todhunter, Life of Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan (1895); J. F. Taylor, Owen Roe O’Neill (1896); Michael MacDonagh, Bishop Doyle: A Biographical and Historical Study (1896); Sir Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Red Branch, with an introduction by Mary Ferguson (1897).
65. W. B. Yeats, “Some Irish National Books,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 9, “Early Articles and Reviews,” ed. John Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre (1894; repr. New York: Scribner, 2004), 247.
66. Mangan praise articles are reprinted in Joyce, Occasional Critical and Politics Writings, 53–60, 127–136. Joyce, Ulysses, 12.134, 13.1149; Joyce, Occasional Critical and Politics Writings, 124.
67. Joyce, Occasional Critical and Politics Writings, 128. The extant manuscript ends with “the foundation of the separatist journal, The Nation, founded by three leaders, Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon (father of the ex-leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party)”; Duffy, the third founder, would have begun the lost page.
68. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 344.12. Joyce, Occasional Critical and Politics Writings, 137. Yeats’s first publication after the Duffy dispute was The Celtic Twilight (1893).
69. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.28, 10.582, 1.490.
70. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.639–56, 17.248; Yeats, “Some Irish National Books,” 247.
71. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.606.
72. Bloom is not the only character in Ulysses with plans to capitalize on Stephen’s wit. “I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me,” the Englishman Haines says to Stephen at the beginning of the text, “That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol of Irish art is deuced good.” Joyce, Ulysses, 1.480.
73. Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature, 13.
74. The catechism form of the episode lampoons this mode of instruction.
75. W. B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (London: Laurie, 1922), 90.
76. Helen O’Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 204. O’Connell’s book offers a tremendously thorough and generative account of the New Irish Library dispute.
77. Joyce, Occasional Critical and Politics Writings, 50.
78. Malcolm Brown makes this suggestion in Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature, 359.
79. Yeats, “Ireland After Parnell,” 188.
80. O’Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement, 198–99.
81. James Joyce, “Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, February 11, 1907,” in Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1927), 147. Conflictingly, Joyce also chastised Yeats for his “floating esthete’s will” and “treacherous instinct of adaptability” in pandering to the masses. Joyce, Occasional Critical and Politics Writings, 51. But Brown similarly identifies Yeats’s “laughable alienation from the Irish nation, past or present.” Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature, 370. Joyce’s contradictory relation to Yeats is a very complex affair, informed by their different religious backgrounds, among other factors, as explored by Alistair Cormack, Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and Reprobate Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
82. Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 145–61, at 147.
83. Kevin Barry, introduction to James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xxix.
84. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3.
85. Thomas E Connolly, “Personal Library of James Joyce: A Descriptive Bibliography,” University of Buffalo Studies 22, no. 1 (April 1955): 38.
86. Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature, 4.
87. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 13.
88. Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (Los Angeles: Miramax, 2001), 441.
89. James Joyce, Dubliners (1914; repr. New York: Signet, 1991), 134.
90. Joyce, Ulysses, 16.535 (italics added).
92. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 614.22, 614.8.
93. Quoted in Jon Hegglund, “Ulysses and the Rhetoric of Cartography,” Twentieth Century Literature 49, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 164–92, at 178.
94. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 11.07-11.13 (italics added).
95. Joyce, Ulysses, 621.01, 620.31–32.
96. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.2124.
97. James Joyce, quoted in Max Eastman, The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science (New York: Scribner, 1935), 104.
98. Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in Perspectives by Incongruity, ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 296.
99. Michael McKeon, “Prose Fiction: Great Britain,” in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 610.
100. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.384.
101. Weinstein, Recovering Your Story, 102.
102. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 179.26–27.
103. John Cage, Writing Through Finnegans Wake (Tulsa, Okla.: University of Tulsa Monograph Series, 1978); David Melnick, Men in Aida (Berkeley, Calif.: Tuumba, 1983).
5. MODERNISM WITHOUT TEARS
1. Promotional blurb for Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (London: Picador, 1998); Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011), 50; Theodor Adorno, “Short Commentaries on Proust,” Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 182.
2. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (New York: Vintage Reissue, 1990); Ilana Simons, A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf (New York: Penguin, 2007); James Hawes, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008); Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: Norton, 2009); Marty Beckerman, The Hemingway: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy Chested Retro Sexual Lesson Within (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011); Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013) Nina Lorez Collins, What Would Virginia Woolf Do? (New York: Grand Central Life & Style, 2018).
3. Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 98–107, at 105.
4. Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
5. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances” [Der Familienroman der Neurotiker], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Words of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey [1908] (London: Hogarth, 1925), 9:237–41; Marthe Roberts, Origins of the Novel, trans. Sacha Rabinowitch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 138.
6. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22, 27.
7. Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult.” Masscult and Midcult, 47.
9. Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” 50, 48, 61.
10. De Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life, 24–25.
11. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).
12. Theodor Adorno, “Short Commentaries on Proust,” 181; Adorno, “On Proust,” Notes to Literature 2 (New York: Columbia, 1974): 317.
13. Adorno, “Short Commentaries on Proust,” 175.
14. C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy [1939] (New York: HaperCollins, 2017), 14.
15. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–21.
16. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
17. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972).
18. Jakob Norberg, “Adorno’s Advice: Minima Moralia and the Critique of Liberalism,” PMLA 126, no. 2 (March 2011): 398–411, at 406, 407.
19. Ryan Lizza, quoted in Norberg, “Adorno’s Advice,” 407.
21. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 79.
22. Charles Eliot quoted in Walter B. Kolesnik, Mental Discipline in Modern Education (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 20.
23. William Payne quoted in Kolesnik, Mental Discipline in Modern Education, 20.
24. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 33; Kolesnik, Mental Discipline in Modern Education, 4.
25. Kolesnik, Mental Discipline in Modern Education, 19.
26. Noah Porter quoted in Graff, Professing Literature, 31.
27. Graff, Professing Literature, 31, 34; Arnold Bennett, “James Joyce’s Ulysses,” in The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett, ed. Samuel Hynes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 211–17, at 215.
28. Kolesnik, Mental Discipline in Modern Education, 15, 5.
29. For an interesting discussion of these, see Alan Golding, “Louis Zukofsky and the Avant-Garde Textbook,” Chicago Review 55, nos. 3–4 (Autumn 2010): 27–36.
30. Paul Valéry quoted in Theodor Adorno, “The Artist as Deputy,” in Notes to Literature, 1958, vol. 1, 105.
31. See, for example, Maja Djikic and Keith Oatley, “The Art in Fiction: From Indirect Communication to Changes of the Self,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 8, no. 4 (2014): 498–505; see also the discussion of The Great Gatsby in Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 5 (2000): 701–21.
32. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 210.
33. Anne Landers, Daily News, October 16, 1985.
34. Abigail Van Buren, The Best of Dear Abby (Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews McMeel, 1981), 165–166.
35. Merve Emre, Paraliterary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 3.
36. For me, “modernist negation” designates the movement’s formal and thematic repudiation of paradigms of progress, participation, and integration.
37. One of the first advice columns was John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury in 1690. In 1704 Daniel Defoe came across Dunton’s publication and started an advice column of his own, which eventually became so popular he was forced to make it a separate publication, The Little Review. Soon thereafter the advice column crossed the Atlantic, where Benjamin Franklin offered counsel under the guise of different characters in his Pennsylvania Gazette (1729). In the early twentieth century, the advice column found an eager audience among Jewish immigrants to the United States, most notably in novelist Abraham Cahan’s Bintel Brief (1906), which tackled problems pertaining to cultural integration in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. But it was chiefly in the writings of Beatrice Fairfax and Dorothy Dix (1802–1887) that the advice column would emerge in the form we recognize today, with its specialization in social and domestic quandaries. These women’s columns borrowed some of their popularity from the success of Victorian serialized, epistolary narratives. And the influence went both ways: the Edwardian novelist Arnold Bennett got his start penning a women’s advice column under the pseudonym “Gwendolyn.” For more on the origins of the advice column, see W. Clark Hendley, “Dear Abby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and the Eighteenth Century: The Origins of the Newspaper Advice Column,” The Journal of Popular Culture (Fall 1977), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1977.00345.x. Despite its title, Hendley’s piece does not discuss Abby’s references to West’s novella.
38. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’, ” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 26.
39. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso Press, 1984), 98; Franco Moretti, “The Spell of Indecision,” New Left Review 1, no. 164 (July–August 1987): 27–33.
40. Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 110.
41. Marion Meade, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (New York: Mariner, 2010), 145.
42. As Goldman notes, with every reference to Miss Lonelyhearts in the third person masculine, a “crisis in gender categorization” comes to the fore. Jane Goldman, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts and the Party Dress’: Cross-Dressing and Collage in the Satires of Nathanael West,” Glasgow Review 2 (1993): 40–54.
The jarring fact of the female advice column’s male authorship is something West exploits from the very first line of Miss Lonelyhearts, which reads: “The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post Dispatch (Are-you-in-trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.” Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, in Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings [1933] (New York: Library of America, 1997), 59.
43. T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” Advertising and Society Review 1, no. 1 (2000): 13.
44. Susan Chester, “Never Too Busy,” Brooklyn Daily Times, February 6, 1929.
45. Erving Goffman, “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure,” Psychiatry 15 (1952): 451–63.
46. West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 62.
47. Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth (London: Routledge, 1994), 155.
48. As David Galloway explains, A Cool Million shows “that the inevitable outcome of the frustration of the success dream was the growth of Fascism.” Nathanael West, A Cool Million (London: Neville Spearman, 1954), 119. A Cool Million follows the travails of Lemuel Pitkin as he becomes embroiled in an American fascist organization inspired by the self-help philosophy of Benjamin Franklin.
49. John Dewey, “A Sick World,” New Republic 33 (1923): 217–18.
50. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 263.
51. See Douglas Shepard, “Nathanael West Rewrites Horatio Alger Jr.,” Satire Newsletter 3 (Fall 1965): 13–28.
52. Susan Chester, “School for You,” Brooklyn Daily Times, January 17, 1929.
53. Recall the masochism of the Sandow scene in Joyce’s “Circe” that I discussed in chapter 4.
54. Susan Chester, “Not a Smarty Type,” Brooklyn Daily Times, January 31, 1929.
55. Susan Chester, “Response to ‘Not a Smarty Type’, ” Brooklyn Daily Times, January 31, 1929.
56. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, 163, 164.
57. West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 77–78.
58. David Gudelunas, Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2008), 23, 206.
59. Rick Kogan, America’s Mom: The Life, Legacy, and Letters of Ann Landers (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 73.
60. Evidently, Clarkson also misreads the end of West’s story, unless she was misinformed by Landers’s written comments about the story during her interview prep.
62. West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 71.
63. John Day interview with Ann Landers, “Day at Night,” February 12, 1974, Paley Center for Media, New York.
64. Gudelunas, Confidential to America, 96. However, critics charged that rather than offering access to experts Landers merely supplanted their accredited advice with her own unfounded opinions. Nevertheless, according to her, it was this willingness to consult her many contacts from her political years, including a Supreme Court Justice and the president of Notre Dame University, for their input on readers’ problems that landed her the job. According to other accounts, however, it was simply her physical resemblance to the previous Ann Landers, a nurse from Chicago named Ruth Crowley, that got her hired. Although she downplayed the work of her predecessor, the column had already been successful for seven years when Landers took over the Dear Ann mantle in 1955.
65. Van Buren, The Best of Dear Abby, 166.
66. Van Buren, The Best of Dear Abby, 166.
67. West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 84.
68. Van Buren, The Best of Dear Abby, 166.
69. Nathanael West, with Boris Ingster, “A Cool Million: A Screen Story,” in Novels and Other Writings, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Library of America, 1997), 745.
70. Max Eastman, Art and the Life of Action (London: George Allan & Unwin, 1935), 66.
71. Nathanael West, Novels and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), 794–95.
72. Nathanael West, “Letter to Malcolm Cowley, May 11, 1939,” in Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings, 794.
73. Editorial, Nevada State Journal [Reno], May 7, 1982, in Editorials on File 13, no. 9, 540.
74. Editorial, The Kansas City Star, May 6, 1982, in Editorials on File 13, no. 9, 540.
75. Editorial, The Kansas City Star, May 6, 1982, in Editorials on File 13, no. 9, 538.
76. West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 63.
78. Editorial, The Kansas City Star, May 6, 1982, in Editorials on File 13, no. 9, 538.
79. Editorial, The Sun [Vancouver, B.C.], May 7, 1982, in Editorials on File 13, no. 9, 539.
81. Editorial, The Hartford Courant, May 6, 1982, in Editorials on File 13, no. 9, 540.
82. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 19.
83. Editorial, The Sun [Vancouver, B.C.], May 7, 1982, in Editorials on File 13, no. 9, 539.
84. Editorial, The Virginian-Pilot [Norfolk, Va.], May 10, 1982, in Editorials on File 13, no. 9, 541.
85. West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 689.
86. Randy Cohen, “The Ethicist: Stealth Progressive,” New York Times, December 29, 2002.
87. Cheryl Strayed interview with Jeff Baker, “Portland Author Cheryl Strayed, also Known as Dear Sugar, Writes Personal Stories That Bond with Her Devoted Readers,” The Oregonian, February 18, 2012.
88. Rita Barnard, “The Storyteller, the Novelist, and the Advice Columnist: Narrative and Mass Culture in ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 44.
89. Gudelunas, Confidential to America, 158.
92. William Grimes, “Dear Abby Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” New York Times, March 30, 1997.
94. For a generative defense of literary consolation that emerged during the late stages of this book’s production, see David James, Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
95. Theodor Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” New German Critique 26 (Spring–Summer 1982): 119–50.
96. Ned Beauman, “Fail Worse,” The New Inquiry, February 9, 2012, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/fail-worse/; Mark O’Connel, “The Stunning Success of Fail Better,” Slate, January 29, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/01/samuel_beckett_s_quote_fail_better_becomes_the_mantra_of_silicon_valley.html.
97. Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (New York: Crown, 2009), 56.
98. See, for instance, Roger Fisher, Getting to Yes: How to Negotiate Agreement Without Giving In (New York: Penguin Press, 1981).
99. Richard Seaver, introduction to I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader, ed. Richard W. Seaver (New York: Grove, 1976), 352.
100. Blurb on Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek.
101. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegen Paul, 1984), 1.
102. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Signet Classic, 1991).
103. Charles Kingsley, Westword Ho! (London: Macmillan, 1894), 16; quoted in James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995),7.
104. Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 1.
105. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983), 45.
106. Samuel Beckett, “Dante … Bruno. Vico. Joyce,” in A Samuel Beckett Reader (New York: Grove, 1976), 117.
107. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 169.
108. Declan Kiberd, “Samuel Beckett and the Protestant Ethic,” in The Genius of Irish Prose, ed. Augustine Martin (Dublin and Cork: Mercier, 1984), 123.
109. Dante, Purgatorio, trans. Allen Mandlebaum (Toronto: Bantam, 1982), Canto IV, 123.
110. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1958), 314.
111. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove, 1957), 67.
113. Oscar Wilde, quoted in The Life of Oscar Wilde (Boston: Aldine, 1910), 181.
114. John Mitchel, Jail Journal, or Five Years in British Prisons (New York: Office of the “Citizen,” 1854).
115. Brian Friel, Translations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); Eavan Boland, “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,” In a Time of Violence (New York/London: Norton & Company, 1994), 7.
116. Stephen Brown, “Fail Better! Samuel Beckett’s Secrets of Business and Branding Success,” Business Horizons 49, no. 2 (2006): 161–69.
117. Brown, “Fail Better!,” 168.
118. Gregory Dobbins, Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Idleness (Dublin: Field Day, 2010), 5.
119. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Grove: New York, 1954), 51, 10, 8, 12.
120. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 39.
121. Émile Coué, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion, trans. Archibald Stark Van Orden (New York: Malkan, 1922), 8; Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (New York: Grove, 1961), 11, 52, 24.
122. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 25, 24.
123. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 25; Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2, ed. John Bigelow (New York & London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904) 29; Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 20.
124. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (New York: Anchor, 2004), 245.
125. The Handmaid’s Tale, season, 1, episode 5, “Faithful,” Hulu, May 10, 2017.
126. Megan Hunter, The End We Start From (New York: Grove, 2017), 84, 36.
127. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book Ever Written (New York: Noonday, 1983), 87.
128. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 37–38.
129. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove, 1957), 21.
130. Samuel Beckett, Molloy (New York: Grove, 1955), 41.
131. William H. McGuffey, “Try, Try Again,” in McGuffey’s New Fourth Eclectic Reader: Instructive Lessons for the Young (New York: Wilson, Hinkle, 1856), 95.
132. Jerzy Kosinski, Being There (New York: Grove, 1970); Forrest Gump, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Paramount Pictures, 1994).
133. Quoted in John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 185.
134. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 135.
6. PRACTICALITY HUNGER
2. See Gerry Smith, “Trump Turmoil Gives Much-Needed Jolt to Book Publishing Business,” Bloomberg News, September 27, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/trump-turmoil-gives-much-needed-jolt-to-book-publishing-business; Robert Walker, “Stressed Britons Buy Record Number of Self-Help Books,” The Guardian, March 9, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/09/self-help-books-sstressed-brits-buy-record-number.
3. Paul Sweetman quoted in Walker, “Stressed Britons Buy Record Number of Self-Help Books.”
4. Stendhal, De L’Amour (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1959), 41.
5. Mohsin Hamid quoted in Bryan Appleyard, “He’s Seen Our Future,” The Sunday Times, March 17, 2013.
6. Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (New York: Riverhead, 2013), 20, 19.
9. Angelia Poon, “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 52, no. 1 (2015): 2.
10. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 83.
13. Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich, 97, 77.
15. Eleanor Davis, “Talking Comics With Tim: Eleanor Davis on How to Be Happy,” interview by Tim O’Shea, CBR.com, June 30, 2014, https://www.cbr.com/talking-comics-with-tim-eleanor-davis-on-how-to-be-happy/; Sheila Heti, “Sheila Heti on Girls, Self-Help Books, and Why We Do Drugs,” interview by Shona Sanzgirl, San Francisco Weekly, June 22, 2012, https://archives.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2012/06/22/interview-sheila-heti-on-girls-self-help-books-and-why-we-do-drugs.
18. Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? (New York: Picador, 2012), 4, 17, 228.
19. Heti, How Should a Person Be?, 189.
20. Heti, How Should a Person Be?, 190, 190–91.
21. Judith Hilkey, Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 34–38.
24. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1991), 5.
25. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 69.
26. Heti, How Should a Person Be?, 274.
27. Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich, 195; Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 2007).
30. Beatrice Fairfax quoted in David Gudelunas, Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction, 2008), 40.
31. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984), 44.
32. Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (New York: HarperOne, 2016); Sarah Knight, Get Your Shit Together: How to Stop Worrying About What You Should Do So You Can Finish What You Need to Do and Start Doing What You Want to Do (New York: Little, Brown, 2016); Luvvie Ajayi, I’m Judging You: the Do-Better Manual (New York: Henry Holt, 2016); Sarah Knight, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do (New York: Little, Brown, 2015); Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett, Fuck Feelings: One Shrink’s Practical Advice for Managing All Life’s Impossible Problems (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Derek Doepker, Break Through Your BS: Uncover Your Brain’s Blind Spots and Unleash Your Inner Greatness (self-pub., ExcuseProof.com, 2015); Jen Sincero, You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2013); Gary John Bishop, Unfuck Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life (New York: HarperOne, 2017). Some of these books even have their own imprint, advertised as “A No F*cks given guide.”
34. Mark Manson, “Mark Marson: Author. Thinker. Life Enthusiast,” accessed July 20, 2018, Infinity Squared Media LLC, markmanson.net.
36. Blurb for Eva Hoffman, How to Be Bored (The School of Life) (London: Macmillan, 2016).
37. Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, 4.
38. Knight, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck, 35.
39. Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, 19.
40. Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 86.
41. Compare with John Parkin, Fuck It Therapy: The Profane Way to Profound Happiness (London: Hay House, 2015); Jen Sincero, You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2013); Carl Alasko, Beyond Blame: Freeing Yourself from the Most Toxic Emotional Bullsh*t (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2011).
42. Quoted in Sandra Tsing Loh, “Don’t Do It: The Simple Solution to Clearing the To-Do List,” New York Times, March 28, 2017.
44. Benjamin Schreier, The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Simon Critchley, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (Boston: Polity, 2010).
45. Samuel Smiles, “Preface,” Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), v–vi.; Carnegie, How to Win Friends, 37.
46. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2010).
48. David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life (New York: Random House, 2013).
50. Seneca, quoted in Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 162.
51. Kamtekar, “Marcus Aurelius.”
52. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 305.
53. Gertrude E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), 11.
54. Epictetus Discourses, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Edinburgh: Loeb Classical Library, 1928), 3.8.1–5.
55. Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 208.
57. Hugh Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2005), xii.
58. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury, 1979). 381.
59. Henry James, “The Works of Epictetus,” Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 10, 13.
60. Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
61. Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich, 222.
62. Amy Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 105.
63. Alice Bennett, Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31.
64. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 504.
65. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 83–107.
66. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 89.
67. Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich, 160.
68. Junot Díaz, “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” chap. 8 in Drown (New York: Riverhead, 1997), 139–49; Dany Laferrière, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, trans. David Homel (Vancouver, B.C.: Douglas & McIntyre, 1989); Pam Houston, “How to Talk to a Hunter,” in The Best American Short Stories 1990, ed. Richard Ford and Shannon Ravenel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 98–104; Lorrie Moore, Self-Help (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1985); Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (New York: Vintage, 1984). This American fiction followed the European second-person experiments of authors such as Italo Calvino and Georges Perec.
69. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [1925] (New York: Scribner, 2004), 1.
70. Friedrich Nietzsche quoted in Harold Bloom, The Victorian Novel (New York: Chelsea House, 2004), 8.
71. Diaz, “How to Date a Browngirl,” 145, 149.
72. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesly Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2005).
73. David Palumbo-Lui, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 399.
74. Eleanor Ty, Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 10, 16, 10.
75. Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays (Boston: Mariner, 2018); Anelise Chen, So Many Olympic Exertions (Los Angeles: Kaya, 2017); Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 2010), 37.
76. Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, 111.
77. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 12.
78. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 95.
79. Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 2010), 115, 125.
80. Lorrie Moore, “How to Be an Other Woman,” in Self-Help: Stories (New York: Knopf, 1985), 17; Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, 144.
81. Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, 148.
84. Eleanor Ty, Asianfail, 16.
86. Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (New York: Penguin, 2015); Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
87. Henry Davenport Northrop, Joseph R. Gray, and I. Garland Penn, The College of Life or Practical Self-Educator: A Manual of Improvement for the Colored Race (Washington, D.C., 1895).
88. Henry A. Giroux, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 123; 124.
89. Gwendolyn Brooks, Primer for Blacks (Chicago: Black Position, 1980); 50 Cent and Robert Greene, The 50th Law (New York: G-Unit, 2009); DJ Khaled, The Keys (New York: Crown Archetype, 2016).
90. Thurston, How to Be Black, 166, 163.
93. Hayes, How to Be Drawn, 8–9.
94. D. L. Hughley and Doug Moe, How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice from White People (New York: Harper Collins, 2018).
96. Ali Smith, How to Be Both (New York: Anchor, 2014), 134–35.
97. Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 2.
98. Beth Blum, “Therapeutic Redescripton,” in Literature and Human Flourishing, ed. James English and Heather Love, forthcoming.
100. Wendy Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture, 47.
102. Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941), 293–304, at 299.
103. O.E.D. definition of “advice,” quoted in Miriam Locher, Advice Online: Advice Giving in an American Internet Health Column (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006), 3.
CODA: THE SHADOW UNIVERSITY OF SELF-HELP
1. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 13, 14.
2. Douglas Kellner, introduction to Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches, ed. Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 6.
3. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834; repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 85–88.
4. Samuel Smiles, “The Education of the Working Classes” reprinted in The Northern Star, 8, no. 404 (August 9, 1845), 3.
5. Sandra K. Dolby, Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 26.
6. Og Mandino, University of Success [1980] (New York: Bantam, 1983).
8. Acacia C. Parks, “The State of Positive Psychology in Higher Education: Introduction to the Special Issue,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 6, no. 6 (November 2011): 429.
9. Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29.
11. Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 66.
13. Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art as Therapy (London: Phaidon Press, 2013), 11.
14. Tal Ben-Shahar, introduction to Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), x–xi.
15. Tal Ben-Shahar, Even Happier: A Gratitude Journal for Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), xi.
19. Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 13.
20. See Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), xviii.
21. Eduard C. Lindeman quoted in Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, 442.
22. Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!”, New Literary History 42, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 573–91; Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization, or On Institutional Time,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 2–3.
23. Edward S. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), 61–62.
24. Tim Lacy, The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 30, 87.
25. Dwight Macdonald quoted in Lacy, The Dream of a Democratic Culture, 141.
26. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), 205–7.
27. Adler and Van Doren, How to Read a Book, 213–14.
28. Ivor A. Richards, How to Read a Page (Boston: Beacon, 1941), 22.
29. Paul Fry, “I. A. Richards,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 179–99, at 190.
30. I. A. Richards quoted in David Bartholomae, “The Reading of Reading: I. A. Richards and M. J. Adler,” in Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 218.
31. Richards, How to Read a Page, 15.
32. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 150; Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), 29.
34. David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 6.
35. Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 7.
37. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
38. Kevin Lamb, “Foucault’s Aestheticism,” Diacritics 35, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 53.
39. Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–82, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 242. On this last point, it is interesting to consider Pierre Hadot’s critique of the self-centeredness of Foucault’s concept of ancient spiritual exercises, which Hadot reminds us were ultimately oriented toward the transcendence of the self not its affirmation. Pierre Hadot, “Reflections on the Cultivation of the Self,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 206–13.
40. Michel Foucault interview by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “How We Behave: Sex, Food, and Other Ethical Matters,” Vanity Fair 46, no. 9 (1983), 60–69.
41. Sedgwick describes the influence of Foucault’s “care of the self” on her theory of repair in Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 137.
42. Amanda Anderson, “Therapeutic Criticism,” Novel 50, no. 3 (November 2017): 321–28.
43. Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan, The Teaching Archive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
44. Ruddick, “When Nothing Is Cool”; North, Literary Criticism, 170, 7.
45. North, Literary Criticism, 6.
46. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 9.
47. René Wellek, “The Literary Criticism of Frank Raymond Leavis,” in Literary Views: Critical and Historical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 190.
48. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 321.
50. Andrew Goldstone, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3, 6.
51. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (New York: Routledge, 1984); Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It (New York: George H. Doran, 1909); Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein (New York: Routledge, 2002), 277–280; Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London: Ward Lock, 1850), xi.
52. D. T. Max, “Happiness 101,”New York Times, January 7, 2007.
53. Steve Salerno, SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (New York: Crown, 2005), 12.
56. For instance, Aarthi Vadde and Melanie Micir “Obliterature: Towards an Amateur Criticism,” Modernism/Modernity 25, no. 3 (September 2018): 517–49; Merve Emre, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Rita Felksi, The Uses of Literature (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008); Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (New York: Basic Books, 2019).
57. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, 42.
59. For some recent examples, see Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018); Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now (New York: Viking, 2018); James E. Ryan, Wait, What?: And Life’s Other Essential Questions (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2017).
60. Elaine Scarry, “The Intimate Life of Violence,” interview by Brad Evans, Los Angeles Review of Books, December 4, 2017.
62. Werner Hofmann, Caricature: From Leonardo to Picasso (New York: Crown, 1957), 11.
63. Charles Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 110.
65. Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter, 111.
67. Wendy Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 215.
68. Patricia Neville, “Helping Self-Help Books: Working Towards a New Research Agenda,” Interactions Studies in Communications and Culture 3, no. 3 (2012): 361–79.