Discursive construction of success and failure in self- help books employed in classrooms in universities

Abstract

This paper presents one of the results of the doctoral dissertation entitled The leader’s ethos: a critical outlook in the academic sphere in universities, whose aim is to identify different discursive images of leaders in self-help books employed to teach leadership in high education courses. This study is theoretically framed in the field of discourse analysis based on a historical and sociocultural perspective of language, following M. Bajtin’s ideas (1984). From this theoretical and methodological, this study is also framed in the Social Declarative Dynamic, SDD (Martínez, 2001, 2005a, 2005b, 2007, 2013). The results are related to the discursive construction of privileged affairs and topics that were found in the corpus analysis: two texts belonging to the discourse genres Self-help: The cow, how to get rid of a life of mediocrities (Cruz, 2003) and 7 habits of highly effective people (Covey, 2009).