Managing academic conflict in English and Spanish academic book reviews: an intercultural rhetoric study

This paper was presented at the InterLAE Conference, organised by Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana (http://www.unizar.es/interlae/conference08.html) in JACA on 11-13 December 2008
Reviewing an academic book can be considered as a potential face-threatening act. The aim of the present paper is to provide insight into how scholars from different but comparable writing cultures manage the potential academic conflict caused by reviewing an academic book. Based on two comparable corpora of 20 academic book reviews of literature written in international English and 20 in Castilian Spanish, the paper compares the frequency and type of critical comments made by the reviewers on the book under review as a function of the size of the academic community the author of the book and the reviewer belong to. Critical comments are defined as positive or negative appreciations of a given aspect or sub-aspect of the book under review. They are identified, interpreted and measured in a way that takes the co-text and the rhetorical context into account, irrespective of their lexico-grammatical realisation. The results show that the Castilian Spanish writers of literary academic book reviews are much less critical in general and show a much lower tendency to evaluate the book negatively than their Anglo-American counterparts. Contextual information provided by the book review writers through an e-mail questionnaire supports the hypothesis that a close personal or professional relationship between the reviewer and the author of the book (or the prospect of it), which is more likely to happen in a small academic community, affects the way scholars manage the academic conflict potentially caused by reviewing a professional peer’s work.
Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (HUM2005-01215)