Book Reviewing in an Age When Everybody's a Critic

• In Event: 179 - Regular Session. Cultural Studies 2: Aesthetic Choices (and Constraints): From Creation to Mediation

Abstract

Book critics are tasked with signaling to readers what new books are worth reading and why through their reviews. But in an age when seemingly "everyone is a critic", how do they construct the unique value of their professional opinions? In the absence of institutional forms of closure, I find that book reviewers rely on what I call the Goldilocks positioning to demarcate what they do from other types of reviewers -- namely literary academics and bloggers. In the classic fairytale, Goldilocks ventures into the home of three bears and rifles through their belongings, which she judges as too hot or too cold, too hard or too soft, etc. But she ultimately encounters a variant that is "just right". In a similar vein, I find that critics distinguish the value of their literary recommendations by characterizing other critics as having too much or too little of three interrelated virtues: knowledge, skill, and attitude. In contrast, the best critics, those critics' whose opinions are worth listening to, exhibit a combination of these virtues that is "just right".

Author

• Phillipa K Chong, Harvard University