Sociologie de la pratique de lecture du « développement personnel » en régime d’autonomie : du texte à l’expérience
(2012)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Delchambre, Jean-Pierre
- Abstract
- (en) This thesis constitutes the self-help literature (literature de développement personnel) as a sociological object. The first chapter is dedicated to the study of the roots od this literature. The second chapter presents and discuss two famous sociological models frequently used to enlighten the success of such literature (the Decline model – Rieff, Lasch, Sennett et al. – and the Power model – Foucault, Rose, the feminists et al.). Facing the caveats of these models, the third chapter uses various resources coming from the field of theory of reception (reception studies, reader-response theory, Rosenblatt, etc.) to build a new model able to understand the act of self-help reading from the reader experience (and not only from the self-help texts). The following chapters analyse this experience paying attention to what the reader does while reading self-help books (concluding agreements with the text, activating stimuli,...). Relying on the works of Wittgenstein, Evans-Pritchard, Winch and Ehrenberg, the sixth and final chapter proposes to conceptualise self-help reading as an « attitude towards contingency » (a way to deal with uncertainty) which is socially distributed and valorised. And in which as well as the « interiority » and the « actions » of the individuals take an important place. The thesis concludes through a comparison of this attitude towards contingency and the one of witchcraft described by Evans Pritchard and Douglas.
- Affiliations
Citations
Marquis, N. (2012). Sociologie de la pratique de lecture du « développement personnel » en régime d’autonomie : du texte à l’expérience. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/63203