Tag Archive

selfhood

Kenneth Burke and Self-Help

Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books too. Some might even say it’s true of religion books… — Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) On the first page of Attitudes toward History, Burke says, “getting along with people is one devil of a difficult task, but… in the last analysis, we Read more