Linguistic specificities of readers’ reviews: literature, discourse, and emotion in Goodreads comments

Abstract

Internet has transformed literary criticism. The books reviews written by professionals and published in the cultural press have been supplemented by a new, more complex, system of criticism. As an empirical study on literary reception, this research addresses one of the spaces in which new reading practices are being practiced: the Goodreads website and, in particular, the reviews from readers. Using a corpus that combines reviews on Goodreads and reviews in tradicional cultural press, this research analyze the ways in which the emotions provoked by reading are discursivized. This will allow us to find discursive differences between the linguistic resources that readers employ in their reviews, on the one hand, and the ones that are used in book reviews, on the other. Specifically, we will examine (i) how emotional information is conveyed (through psychological sentences), (ii) the relationship between reader and autor/work, and (iii) the intimate reading experience.