This innovative study is based mostly on a careful examination of the content of self-help books (as opposed to such factors as marketing, audience composition, or reader-response). Dolby’s distinctly folkloristic approach to self-help literature is evident in three main ways. The first concerns its cultural and aesthetic dynamics: invoking such concepts as traditionality, theme and variation, formulaic composition, bricolage, belief system, and the dialectic of individual and collective worldview, Dolby claims that self-help literature evinces analogies to numerous dimensions of "folklore process." Secondly Dolby examines the use of traditional folklore genres—including proverbs, myths, and personal narratives—within self-help writing; as might be predicted from her earlier work, the analysis of personal narratives is especially subtle and insightful.
The third aspect of Dolby’s folkloristic slant is revealed in a penchant for classifying, for throughout she offers numerous schematizations, some of them reflecting the influence of Proppian morphology. Dolby’s folkloristic classificatory bent sometimes blends with a kind of numerology distinctive of self-help writing itself; for example, she isolates three general literary forms, four concepts of "self," five criticisms made of this genre, a typical seven-step sequence through which readers are led, and eight mythic themes tapped by self-help writers.
Although Dolby advances robust and convincing arguments, I suspect that doubt will remain for some concerning the application of the analytical apparatus of folkloristics to self-help writing. More controversial, at least outside of the narrow circle of folklore studies, will be Dolby’s positive attitude toward this genre: she sees in it an older theme of American worldview, namely self-improvement; and she argues that self-help literature can enrich individuals—providing a means for constructing a personal philosophy—as well as the collective worldview. Self-help is an enterprise toward which academics are typically scornful if not hostile (though Dolby reports that some academics have privately conceded to her that they have read self-help). But even readers who do not agree with Dolby’s upbeat assessment will do well to critically and reflexively ask why, since many of the criticisms of self-help—such as the claim that it recycles with slight modification the same pool of ideas—can equally be made of academic writing. (Need I add that confronting one’s hostility can be the first step in letting go, perhaps marking a life-affirming turn?)
Particularly intriguing are Dolby’s claims about the fundamental lack/lack liquidated of the self-help genre: "the ultimate message of all self-help books is that individuals must detach themselves from the conditioning imposed by the surrounding culture" (66). Readers must "instead learn a new set of values freely chosen without the pressure of cultural sanction" (67). Finally, "the primary achievement of the self-help writer is in making the reader aware of how cultural conditioning works" (67). While Dolby speaks sophisticatedly about the paradoxes inherent in these claims, she also seems to think that something like this actually happens. One who is more skeptically inclined might see reading self-help as a process of becoming conditioned to the belief that one is being liberated. In his oft-quoted phrase "imagined communities," Benedict Anderson described communicative circumstances in which the most diverse social/cultural currents could yet be perceived as integrated. Might not self-help books reflect something like the opposite: the self-help writer allowing the individual reader to indulge in an imagined uniqueness—a uniqueness belied by the mass, generic quality of the advice proffered? This is a question that Dolby raises, though rather obliquely and inconclusively, around the work of self-help writer Peter Kramer.
Self-Help Books is a highly thought-provoking read, one that points in a direction that I hope will continue to develop within our discipline: the influence of traditional folkloric forms on the non-fiction popular literature of our time.
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[Review length: 607 words • Review posted on October 17, 2006]