All About Me, I Mean, You: The Trouble with Narrative Authority in Self-Help Literature

Abstract

Abstract By considering a neglected realm of narrative discourse, this article contributes to the communication scholarship on narrative authority. Authors of self-help books face a challenge that demands different methods of cultivating authority. Rather than do so by articulating professional expertise, they construct their authority based on personal narratives of self-transformation. Throughout the self-help genre's history, a particular type of talking cure has been intimately woven with ideas of selfhood. Positive thinking holds that our thoughts produce reality. Narratives about the self then place a tremendous power in and responsibility on the self, just as they deny the influence of social structures. In this study I aim to expose the implicit values of selfhood and storytelling that are occluded by the explicit stories of a free and helping self espoused in self-help and to demonstrate that that occlusion is enacted through the cultivation of narrative authority. Notes Choate, C. E. (1905). "Committing sickness." In Nautilus 8, December. MacDonald, C. (1897). Metaphysical terminology. Mind. P.43. MISSING: Abundant Living, by E. Stanley Jones. (1942).