... in the 1930s should serve as a warning to critics invested in failure as a figure of opposition. Stein’s work in this vein persistently questions many of the elements of mainstream self-help’s discourse. In “An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men,” a 1922 piece later collected in Useful Knowledge...

...Kaelie Giffel Bringing together Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” this essay argues that Benjamin’s concept of “constellating” events that are noncausally yet historically related to each other is uniquely able to help us grasp the specificity...

... feeling.” Wrong feeling is a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon—an enactment of the modernist allergy to sentiment that nonetheless takes up modernism’s key tropes. Manifesting as affective overflowing, it has no discernible locus in either self or world and yields a series of repetitive, frustrating...

... and variability links it to the democratic project, it also, by the time of her self-help book Everyman’s Genius (1925), suggests the term’s assimilability to more quietist therapeutic and consumerist log- ics of abundance. Genius, in short, becomes a commodity—and, indeed, one perhaps more available...

... be ignored by telling alternative stories about it. 58 Jokes, Fiction, and Lorrie Moore Notes 1. The use of the second person is a prominent feature of Self-Help, Moore’s first book. Here, however, I am bracketing off any consideration of that text. 2. Most notoriously by John Barth, who...

... that was strangely fascinating to me” (11). The analogies between this scene and Freud’s description of narcissism in women help to clarify how a traumatic event such as the one the narrator experiences could give rise to the kind of self-absorption we see above. In his 1925 essay “On Narcissism,” Freud (1994b...

...” (256). He takes their attention to ephemeral, fluid perception before it is subjected to rational interpretation to indicate how important the concept of the impression remains in contemporary culture, and how it has been co-opted by self-help books and corporate training. The intricacies, subtleties...

... and literary senses, is that people are capable of changing. As far as evangelical religion goes, the idea of character development is obvious in the proliferation of pam­ phlets on self-help, thrift, and temperance, among the most prominent examples of Low Church virtues, which were moral ripostes...

... to the nationalist, anti- British (and, in Tagore’s view, anti-Muslim) “negative” swadeshi of boy­ cotting foreign goods (Sarkar 32-33). It is the politics implicit in the boiteko and other self-help and cooperative projects of Botswana (Eiler- son 122), treated by Bessie Head in A Question of Power...

... Thatcherism, which in turn helps establish the conditions for the later readings of Money as an attack on Thatcherism. But first, how does Money evoke Thatcherism? Politics per se do not figure prominently in the text and Self’s single reference to Thatcher—“we’ve got a chick” (146)—is as fleeting...

... scenarios would have “redeem[ed]” Edward illustrates the profound distrust he, not Florence, has of Catholics. Indeed, aside from mentioning that he “cannot, [him]self, help disliking this religion” since “there is always, at the bottom of [his] mind … the feeling of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman” that he...

... their buying patterns are connected to larger social and political forces, the message promotes a lib- ertarian freedom that is impossible to distinguish from a self-help slogan: “I am here to tell you what I saw—And to tell you how such time trips are made—It is a precise operation...

... disorder. For the routines entail distinct registers, dialects, and jargon for each unique narrative voice. The Texas Oilman routine is practically a self-help guide for a wannabe prospector (“So you got the calling and the proper appearance”) (30), the Chess Player evokes an historian’s preten...

... the promise implicit in its title not only to locate the destitute, those placed outside of colonial systems of legitimacy, but also to help readers recognize those Caribbean spaces and the identities they shape that do not appear on colonial maps. In locating those people who are excluded on the basis...

... of humans with the environment. Murray concentrates on Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Samuel Beckett, all of whose experimental work helped to define high Anglo-modernism. She claims that “the figure of the exoskeleton (or outer shell) can shed new light on modernism’s linguistic and formal...

...: Along with the narrative . . . the self doubles itself and arrives too late. . . .Conrad’s method of revision helps prepare the ground for modernist selves that emerge incompletely through shifting processes and never as completed forms. (178) Conrad’s writing practice...

... McPhail, adds helpful maps that delineate Owen’s precise movements in battle, the book is thoroughly in the hagiographic tradition. As Samuel Hynes notes, Edmund Blunden’s 1931 “Memoir” assembled the saintly, doomed Owen. The memoir is, in Hynes’s words, “a classic myth...

...-shattering of sex helps ex­ plain his repeated formulations of homoness as both “self-divestiture” (Homos 128) and, somewhat more disturbingly, a rejection of or indiffer­ ence to the very personhood of the other (an indifference that, like the impropriety of self-forgetting, joins...

...Aidan Wasley Presenting an encouraging mix of senior scholars with newer critical voices that are helping chart the future of the field, Costello and Galvin’s Auden at Work makes for an impressive companion to the recent Cambridge collection, W. H. Auden in Context , edited by Sharpe...

... was worth recording!” (Brittain,“War Service” 367). One might imagine Paul Fussell offering a similar judgment in The Great War and Modern Memory, the seminal 1975 study that made the Modern Library’s list of 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century and helped establish the tone...