When literature professors take stock of their institutional decline, one question they find themselves asking is why ordinary, nonacademic people read literature at all. Not why should they, but simply, why do they? As the threat of irrelevance looms, academics are reconsidering the pleasure of the untrained reader.
This is the deepest background of Beth Blum’s excellent study, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature. A professor of English at Harvard, Blum explores the persistent impulse to mine literature for wisdom and guidance. “At a time when the value of literature is often called into question,” she writes, “self-help offers a reminder of the promises of transformation, agency, culture, and wisdom that draw readers to books.” Our cultural moment, she believes, is an implicit rebuke of both the “critique” of literary theory and our residual convictions about how “serious” literature is consumed. Because critical theory harbors a “suspicion towards discourses of agency and self-cultivation,” it looks askance at the idiom of “self-help,” which masks social problems by exaggerating individual agency. Self-help, moreover, is seen to “exacerbate the feelings of personal insufficiency…upon which consumer capitalism feeds.”
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