of abstract: Book-marking the self: the rituals of buying and reading self-help (original) (raw)

Many commentators have argued that contemporary society has become increasing reflexive and with this a return in interest with the self-as both an ontological property that can be 'rediscovered' by the atomised social actor, and as an existential project or lifestyle complete with a set of 'life skills ' (e.g. Foucault, 1988, Giddens, 1991. This objectification of the 'self' in late modernity has taken many forms but this paper would like to address the increasing psychological nature of the self as a prescriptive discourse through the global cultural industry of self-help books. Self-help and self-awareness books have had a consistently high rating in the American bestseller lists over the past thirty years with domestic sales reaching $9.6 billion in 2006. This strong consumptive relationship with self-help books is not an exclusively American phenomenon but can also be found to be on the increase in Britain, Japan, China, and India to name a few. Despite the huge popularity of self-help books, the practice of buying and reading self-help books and the many anecdotal claims made by their readers that these books have 'changed' their lives the phenomenon of self-help has received very little scholarly attention. In this paper I would like to redress this academic blind spot and investigate the impact that self-help books and their message of self-knowledge and self-awareness have on their atomised reader. A discursive analysis of self-help books will be undertaken with the purpose of exposing the ideological claims of self-help books. This alternative interpretative framework will be tested against the views and responses of regular self-help readers. By combining these two methods it is hoped to expose the nature of self-help books and locate the place that the search for self-knowledge and self-care have acquired in contemporary society.