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Self-Help has a long tradition in the United States and two of the bestsellers from the time when it became viral are still in print, more than 80 years after their first publication: Dale Carnegie's How to win friends (1936) and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937). The beginnings of self-help in North America, which occurs (perhaps) with the arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts, has at least one significant feature in common with its contemporary systematizations to be bought in book shops: the promise of a sort of salvation, the alleviation of uncertainty, and guidance in the face of contingency. In a research project, here at Humboldt Universität, we argue that mass culture emerging around the year 1900 integrated or institutionalized and commodified North American self-help culture, which had been more vernacular, local and spontaneous before its commercialization. In this seminar, we will explore and analyze self-help guides from Benjamin Franklin to Napoleon Hill (you are of course free to jump right in to the ocean of more recent publications), describe their features and strategies and try to be aware of differences in race and gender and what self-help do not say or do. Subsequently, we will (in the form of group projects) test our research hypothesis and probe various mass cultural products (they can be books, films, pulps, dance, newspapers, magazine etc.) and find out to which extent they are related to the tradition of self-help.
Support:
There will be a Moodle site with information and links. The key is “Optimization”. No registration through Agnes.
Readings:
- Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided. How Positive Thinking is undermining America. New York: Henry Holt, 2009.
- Dale Carnegie, How to win friends and influence people. (1936) London: Random House, 2006.
- Napleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. (1937) New York, Penguin, 2005.
- Other texts will be available on Moodle.
Requirements:
As "spezielle Arbeitsleitung" students will produce an academic poster on Self Helf in/and Mass Culture in groups of 4 or 5 persons. As a MAP students in Master American Studies will have to write a term paper (in this or another seminar in the Module). |
