Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
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What does Phillipa Chong’s book reveal about the role of book critics in today’s cultural landscape?
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Hello, NBN listeners. As you know, we have a channel on the network called the NBN Seminar. On that channel, we put books that we believe will be of interest to people across all of our eighty-seven channels. Today we'd like to feature a book by Philippa Chong called Inside the Critic Circle Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times. She talks about how books are reviewed and the challenges book reviewers face in these uncertain times. I hope you enjoy the interview.
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. On this episode, I'm talking to Philippe Chonk, who is an assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University about Inside the Critics Circle, Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times. So welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much.
Um this is uh I think a a brilliant book and it's part of um a a really rich uh moment in um the sociology of culture that's that's coming out of North America, which I I guess tries to grapple with um the question of how do people make judgments in culture? Um and one, you know, really kind of obvious set of uh people making judgments are are critics. And I guess the place to start is is why were you interested in in critics? Well, you know, why are they important and and why why are you interested in in studying?
Yeah, so as you say, there has been a lot of growing interest in judgment. in the cultural sociology and as a sociologist I've been really interested in questions around worth and worthiness. So these include things like who or what do we deem to be worthy. What are the criteria by which we measure this? And also who gets to do the judging? And in fact, critics actually grapple with very similar questions, but specifically um on the topic of books. So they have the task of determining which books are worthy of reading or not. Um, they have to determine what the relevant criteria for making those judgments are, which is tricky in the absence of really any kind of objective standard of aesthetic quality for what makes good fiction.
And many reviewers also question or have the question put to them about Why they should be in the position of making those types of judgments, especially at a time when you can go online and find five hundred other opinions. What makes their opinion stand out or particularly worthwhile? So what I do in this book is draw on interviews that I conducted with book reviewers from places like the New York Times or the Washington Post. And my goal was to describe how critics grapple with these types of questions throughout their review process.
I was r really interested that that that idea about kind of grappling with uh I guess for for those of us who just, you know, kind of read uh critical judgment.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What does Phillipa Chong’s book reveal about the role of book critics in today’s cultural landscape?
0:00–14:46
2
How do critics experience epistemic uncertainty when judging a novel’s quality?
14:46–23:53
3
What factors influence which books and reviewers are matched for a review?
23:53–34:35
4
Why do reviewers sometimes ‘play nice’ and what risks do negative reviews pose?
34:35–41:05
Speakers
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