Self-help and literary study

To literary critics, however, self-help’s habit of mining literature for life lessons was fundamentally antithetical to its status as art. “Serious” readers were not supposed to pattern their moral lives after Jane Eyre any more than they would look to the braided crown of Titian’s Venus of Urbino for hairstyle inspiration. This highbrow hostility towards self-help, Blum suggests, was entwined with the rise of literary studies as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century, with its privileging of puzzlement over pleasure.

From The Times Literary Supplement, in a review of Beth Blum’s The Self-Help Compulsion.¹

I’m not familiar with the book in question, so, I don’t want to make any claims about Blum’s argument. But, I think that there’s a lot of literary criticism history that’s being crunched and conflated in this explanation. In short, working from Blum, Joanna Scutts, the reviewer, describes an 1859 book titled simply Self-Help as the modern originator of the genre. Then the above quote, which is supported by modernists’ “refusal to offer up clear role models or easy answers to life’s questions”.

However, quite a lot happened to our popular and academic relationship with literature between 1859 and the modernist era (in the US and UK, at least). It’s true that modernists “[privileged] puzzlement over pleasure”, but in the late 19th century, literature was often expected to have a moral core, and through the end of the 19th century that is largely how it was taught. The quote above relies on a rather contextually specific definition of critic that arose as a reaction to literary study as the more “scientific” study of literary history toward the end of the 19th century (which was itself a reaction to the predominantly moralist version).²

So, it’s a bit more complicated than that. I think a more precise argument here is that when we shifted into the critical era of Eliot, Pound, et al, self-help as a genre wasn’t privileged because it wasn’t “art” in the sense that they defined it — e.g., as questions, not answers. But, that was a modernist claim, not a disciplinary consensus, and there were certainly still members of the old guard who taught literature as literary history or as a more general moral endeavor.³

As a result, I think it probably falls a bit short as an explanation for why self-help has not traditionally been an object of study in literary circles. At the very least, it glosses over some important pieces of the rise of literary studies as an academic discipline and conflates literary study with literary criticism — which, the two are often used interchangeably even within academia, but in reality aren’t synonymous, much to the consternation of scholars in literary studies who are not critics.

That said, this seems like an interesting book. Literary study and English studies more broadly are notoriously nebulous, and the question of what we mean when we say “literature” is enormously interesting and often puzzling. I suspect there are other explanations as to why self-help books aren’t often studied as literature, but I will note as a compositionist that such books do fall under the purvey of rhet/comp scholarship, although I’m not familiar with anyone else doing work in that area.⁴

One other possible explanation, though, is that in the era prior to literary criticism, when literature was taught with a moralist bent, part of the purpose — at least, here in the US — was to reinforce to the upper crust of society what they needed to know in order to be good upper-class people. Where education was more broadly accessible (e.g., following the establishment of land grant universities), students weren’t taught literature, but rather taught how to write (in a very rigid, grammatical sense, anyway).

The self-help genre, therefore, wouldn’t have been of interest as literature because such students wouldn’t have been its target audience. The self-help genre was designed to help people move up in the world, whereas students studying literature (who typically didn’t read full works, but just pieces) where presumed to already be up in the world.

But, anyway, that’s just a thought. (And for the record, as always, my aim here isn’t to craft a counterargument against either Blum or Scutts, particularly as I haven’t read Blum’s book; I just found that portion of the review interesting.)

¹ And Philip Davis’s Reading for Life, but my concern is with the first section about Blum.

² Information regarding the background of literature in academia comes from Graff’s Professing Literature, Scholes’s The Rise and Fall of English, and Miller’s The Formation of College English, among other sources.

³ And there are still plenty of scholars of literature who are literary historians rather than critics or theorists. Moralism, probably not so much, although I suspect that most of what critics of English studies mean when they decry neo-cultural Marxist critical theorists in the university (or whatever) is something more like a contemporary neo-moralism that teaches literature as a way of understanding other people. However, I don’t think it’s accurate to call that “moralist”, particularly through a 19th-c lens, which considered such morals to be universal, whereas the modern point of that approach is quite the opposite.

⁴ This opens another can of worms in the relationship between English departments (as homes for literary scholarship) and rhet/comp. What does it mean to say that something isn’t an object of study for literary scholars if compositionists do use it? Again, I’m not sure about self-help specifically, but there are lots of kinds of texts that are not “literature” that are nonetheless studied by rhetoricians and compositionists, but because rhet/comp scholars tend to be overlooked as scholars in English studies, that work gets overlooked, as well.