Speaker
Description
New phenomena such as digital social reading, Instapoets and the ‘rating culture’ expressed in online reviews are challenging traditional literary criticism in newspapers and magazines. Millions of reviews on platforms such as Amazon or Goodreads are part of this reading culture and counterbalance professional criticism. At the same time, successful Instapoets such as Rupi Kaur reject the expertise of the gatekeepers of ‘prestigious literary circles’ and attempt to establish a direct connection with readers. In fact, online reviews not only offer new forms of reviewing, but also challenge the prestige of conventional criticism and the traditional distinction between professional and non-professional (amateur) criticism. Social media has undoubtedly made reviewing more democratic and interactive than the traditional paradigm of print reviews (Murray 2018). In this new context, a recurring question arises: ‘Who has the power to determine what is tasteful and what is not?’ (Johannes Franzen 2021). For Baßler (2019), this controversy brings back the old distinctions between low and high culture and between symbolic and economic capital, the latter referring to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who was the first to illustrate the driving forces and institutions of the ‘literary field’. In my keynote speech, I would like to shed light on the current crisis in literary evaluation through some theoretical reflections and experimental evidence from Empirical Aesthetics and Digital Humanities.
| Keywords | Digital Reading Culture, Digital Humanities, Empirical Aesthetics, Literary Evaluation, Democratization of Criticism |
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| massimo.salgaro@univr.it |