Mobilizing the Self

流动性的概念在美国有着至关重要的作用，既是一种神话般的手段，也是国家元代词的核心要素。它的物理、社会和经济意义线索促成了诸如《边疆叙事》或《美国梦》之类的话语。另一种依赖于流动性的相关重要叙事是自我完善的理念，该理念阐述了个人在成功道路上的实践。20世纪30年代商业组织的流行文化/大众文化的产品在内容、形式和生产方面利用了各种不同形式的流动性概念。动员自我表明，20世纪30年代(大萧条)商业化的流行文化及其具体的流动性概念必须被理解为自我完善文化的一部分，为参与者提供他们自己的生活设计和传记的反思和投射模式。为了支持这一论点，我们从20世纪30年代自我完善文学的一些开创性作家(以及他们在19世纪新思想运动和神智学的前辈)开始。随后，我们的目标是分析流行文化/大众文化中的四种截然不同的形态，根据它们所投射的生活设计与自力更生、以目标为导向、工具性思维模式的实践之间的相似性。这些形式包括青少年侦探小说，低俗杂志，非裔美国人周刊《芝加哥捍卫者》的初级版面，以及摇摆和林迪·霍普的舞蹈和音乐文化。我们的目标是表明，这些形式发展了完全不同的，但相关的移动性，自我完善和生活设计的概念。作为下一步，我们将探讨这些产品是否根据Alois Hahn的概念起到传记生成器的作用。这将开启将商业化的流行文化重新定义为20世纪核心传记生成者之一的可能性。

The concept of mobility has a crucial function in the United States, both as a mythopoetic device and as central element of the national metanarratives. Its physical, social, and economic threads of meaning contribute to discourses such as the Frontier narrative or the American Dream. Another, related significant narrative that relies on mobility is the idea of self-improvement, which addresses individual practices on the road to success. Products of commercially organized popular culture/mass culture in the 1930s utilize concepts of mobility in various different forms in terms of content, form, and production. Mobilizing the self suggests that the commercialized popular cultures of the 1930s (of the Great Depression) together with their specific concepts of mobility have to be understood as part and parcel of the cultures of self-improvement which supply their participants with patterns of reflections and projection for their own life designs and biographies. To support this thesis we start with some of the seminal authors of self-improvement literature in the 1930s (and their predecessors of the New Thought Movement and Theosophy in the 19th century). Subsequently we aim to analyze four very different formations within popular culture/mass culture in terms of homologies between their projected life designs and practices of a self-reliant, goal-oriented, instrumental mind-set. These formations consist of adolescent detective fictions, pulp magazines, the junior pages within the African American weekly Chicago Defender and the dance and music culture of swing and lindy hop. We aim to show that these formations develop completely different, yet related concepts of mobility, self-improvement and life design. As a further step we shall explore the question whether these products function as biography generators according to Alois Hahn's concept. This would open the possibility of redefining commercialized popular culture as one of the central biography generators in the 20th century.