Twentieth-Century American Success Rhetoric: How to Construct a Suitable Self.

• Author: Legge, Nancy
• Position: Book review

Twentieth-Century American Success Rhetoric: How to Construct a Suitable Self. By John Ramage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005; pp. xiii + 249. $45.00 cloth.

What does it mean to be successful? wealthy? happy? competent? To uncover some answers, John Ramage analyzes success rhetoric in Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows (1925), Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1956), Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1975), Richard Nixon's Six Crises (1968), Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence (1982), and Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (1989). He determines that success is defined by culture and the rhetorical stance of authors. The rationale for including these texts and not others is clear. Ramage excludes books that omit the concept of identity or the tension between public and private success because such works, typically in the self-help literature or "almost purely exhortative and inspirational (for example, the work of Tony Robbins)," lack "grist" in content and rhetorical assumptions (21). In addition to reflecting cultural moments in the 20th century, included works explore "success-however elusive that concept may prove to be-in the domain of business, [whereas] the goal of texts in the self-help field feature recovery, usually of an identity lost to outside forces or addictive inner demons, in the domestic sphere" (21).

In addition to investigating "success rhetoric," Ramage also examines the gulf between academic and popular literatures. These books are best-sellers, yet they are largely ignored, criticized, and disdained by those in academe. This is ironic since "the principles being expounded are increasingly employed to manage the institutions they inhabit, increasingly mark the beliefs and discourse of the public bodies that oversee and fund their activities, and increasingly marginalize values they hold dear" (5).

Chapter 1 provides a rationale for Kenneth Burke's method of analysis. Ramage answers the criticism that Burke's theories are "dated"-a defense that seems unnecessary for rhetorical critics. He does not outline a systematic Burkean method (e.g., associative/dissociative clusters, the pentad, etc.) but instead employs Burke's language and perspective flexibly; his interpretations of the various examples of success rhetoric highlight different aspects of Burke's perspective. While this...