The Rules of Engagement: Understanding Evaluation from the Perspective of Book Critics

In this dissertation, I examine how book critics establish the literary value of new books through their reviews. And I do so with an analytic focus on the fact that, contra ideals regarding objectivity and dispassionate review processes, critics are real people embedded in real social, cultural, and epistemic contexts which shape how they understand their role as evaluators and ultimately how they review. The dissertation is comprised of three interrelated studies prepared and presented as stand-alone articles. Data come from quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 265 book reviews and interviews with 30 book critics who have published reviews in major American newspapers such as The New York Times, The LA Times, and The Washington Post. And although the terms “novelist”, “books”, and “fiction” proliferate the text, this dissertation does not belong squarely to the sociology of literature. It is in more natural dialogue with cultural sociological work on legitimation, economic sociology, and sociological interest in inequality/stratification. In this first study, I consider how critics, writing for American audiences, impute broader understandings of ethnic and racial difference to their evaluation of books by foreign and racial minority writers. In the second study, I identify four epistemic strategies by which critics hope to turn transform their immediate subjective responses to books into reasoned and inter-subjectively valid appraisals of new books, which they inscribe in their reviews. In the third and final study, I focus on how book critics are structurally embedded in the American literary field with many reviewers themselves being working writers reviewing their peers. And I detail the myriad of professional, interpersonal, and moral tensions that arise from this arrangement, which has direct consequences for what critics put in their reviews.Ph