Abstract
By considering a neglected realm of narrative discourse, this article contributes to the communication scholarship on narrative authority. Authors of self-help books face a challenge that demands different methods of cultivating authority. Rather than do so by articulating professional expertise, they construct their authority based on personal narratives of self-transformation. Throughout the self-help genre's history, a particular type of talking cure has been intimately woven with ideas of selfhood. Positive thinking holds that our thoughts produce reality. Narratives about the self then place a tremendous power in and responsibility on the self, just as they deny the influence of social structures. In this study I aim to expose the implicit values of selfhood and storytelling that are occluded by the explicit stories of a free and helping self espoused in self-help and to demonstrate that that occlusion is enacted through the cultivation of narrative authority.
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