‘Self-Help’ and ‘Literature’ Serve the Same Purpose
Dale Carnegie and Jo March have more in common than you think
Is it possible to read your way to self-improvement? The gatekeepers of literature as high art have always said no. Books are there to be studied, interpreted, admired, even loved — but not used. They are not there to impart lessons to the reader, to model ways of being. One is not “supposed” to turn to Jane Austen for relationship advice, any more than one should use The Odyssey to plan a sightseeing trip to the Greek islands.
And yet, as Harvard English professor Beth Blum demonstrates in her new book The Self-Help Compulsion, the dividing line between those “ambivalent shelf-fellows” literature and self-help has never been clear and has only blurred over time. Readers have always turned to the classics for life lessons, and writers, even the most committed to “art for art’s sake,” as Blum puts it, have been fascinated by advice literature and how-to guides. This is particularly true in uncertain times — like our own.
“Self-help,” Blum explains, can mean two different things. On the one hand, it’s simply a way of reading, a deliberately unsystematic pursuit of life lessons: The reader might glean wisdom from any kind of book, dipping in and casting aside according to her own preferences and needs.
