Du bien-être au marché du malaise: la société du développement personnel par by Nicolas Marquis (review)

Reviews 251 espère que cet ouvrage original et progressif dépassera les cercles universitaires car cet auto-questionnement sur la laïcité est crucial pour tous les pays dits “laïques”. Augustana College (IL) Chadia Chambers-Samadi Marquis, Nicolas. Du bien-être au marché du malaise: la société du développement personnel. Paris: PUF, 2014. ISBN 978-2-13062826-2. Pp. 248. 21 a. A number of books on self-help (le développement personnel) take for granted the effects, good or bad, on readers. This claim, however, should be subject to closer scrutiny according to French sociologist Marquis who treats a corpus of readers’ remarks mainly about French self-help books. He traces two separate historic approaches to a therapeutic culture based, first, on the idea that self-help’s uncontested popularity is a symptom of the decline of individualism and, secondly, on self-help as an attempt to empower the individual. The second approach is an argument made by many self-help books, which he echoes at times:“le travail quotidien sur soi est l’autre clé de l’avancement sur le ‘chemin’ [...] Les trois qualités les plus souvent citées dans la multitude des verbes réflexifs sont le fait de nous interpréter, le fait de nous aimer, et le fait de nous exprimer” (164). Before tackling reader reports on their experiences with self-help in his second chapter, Marquis justifies the choice of Louise M. Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory from among others because the concept of “lecture efférente” suits self-help’s emphasis of a take-away. The schema that results contains a “dispositif” and a “disposition,” which he uses in chapters 3–5 to navigate the corpus while relying constantly on readers’ input. During a radio interview, Marquis claimed that by examining the reactions of readers he was able to maintain neutrality on the question of effect. Indeed, several interesting points emerge from his presentation of the books and the first-person testimonies that are abundant in these chapters. Readers are driven to seek out self-help books by a gap (“brèche”) in their lives, an autobiographical moment about which Marquis later generalizes when he remarks on the“très sérieuses affinités électives avec le monde symbolique dans lequel vivent les individus” (152). That readers “set out,” at least in their minds, is a point that has been raised in a slightly different form by Micki McGee.According to Marquis, authors also often rely on underlying structures based on either tradition, appeals to science or personal witness. Le Monde has reported a growth in interest in“développement personnel”among the French, and works that Marquis cites are no longer just on sale in supermarkets but made available in bookstores to serious readers as well. Hence the title’s second part, “Marché du malaise.” McGee and Eva Illouz, whose books Marquis includes in his bibliography, have written of the pivotal role played by the idea of suffering in self-help culture. In the third part, moreover, in order to explain the effects contained in his findings,he constructs some theories relating to anthropological studies of primitive societies having a belief in magic. This work is worth reading for its insights into self-help readers, essentially in Francophone countries, as well as for its ideas coming from fields as diverse as therapeutic culture, reader-response theory, and Anglo-American philosophy. Télécom école de management (Évry) Charles Egert Pollaud-Dulian, Emmanuel. Charles Martin: féerie pour une grande guerre. Paris: Michel Lagarde, 2013. ISBN 978-2-916 421-40-7. Pp. 60. 16 a. Before 1914 the luxurious fashion publications like La Gazette du bon ton or Modes et manières d’aujourd’hui boasted a stable of brilliant illustrators. Then came the guns of August; the fashion illustrators went off to war. Charles Martin (1884–1934) was one of the most talented among them; he flaunts an immediately recognizable style laced with irony and a witty désinvolture. Martin’s bibliography includes such summits of French illustration as Erik Satie’s Sports et divertissements, twenty short piano scores executed in calligraphy and accompanied by Martin...