Rethinking the Literary Review

C H A R L O T T E M. W R I G H T University of North T exas Rethinking the Literary Review* The present state of academic book reviewing, in literary studies at any rate, is neither happy nor healthy. A few journals pay close attention to their reviews and reviewers, and some good critiques do appear, but too often stand­ ards are lax and reviews mediocre. Scholarly reviews are too frequently brief, impressionistic, formulaic, bland, badly written, or, most distressing of all, nothing more than salespitches orgratuitous hatchet jobs, everso thinly disguised. (Hoge and West, “Academic Book Review­ ing” 35) I Somebody writes a book. The publisher sends a copy to Western American Literature. The Review Editor finds a qualified reviewer, who reads the book and writes the review. When the edited review appears in the journal, offprints are sent to both reviewer and publisher, and the latter forwards a copy to the author. Multiply that by 150-200 books, and you have an idea of the review process followed by Western American Litera­ ture. Add or subtract a few books, allow for minor variations in procedure, and you have an idea of the process followed by dozens of other scholarly journals published in the literary community. Unfortunately, because the product being produced—the review— has lost its footing in the academic world, the process often ends up being a well-intentioned exercise in futility. As Ralph Cohen, Editor of New *This article is based on a paper delivered at the twenty-third annual confer­ ence of the Western Literature Association in Eugene, Oregon on October 5, 1988. 138 Western American Literature Literary History, has put it: “The trust that a reader gives to a reviewer should, under present reviewing conditions, be withheld” (11). The prob­ lem, I believe, stems from the fact that each participant in the reviewing process—author, publisher, editor, reviewer, and reader—has a different notion about the purpose of a review. Authors and publishers often act as if its sole purpose were to provide favorable publicity for their latest literary endeavors. Both have financial interests in the ultimate fate of the book, and both have professional reputations at stake. As author Clay Reynolds noted in a recent speech, “a bad review can be the kiss of death for a book just as a good one can launch an author on his/her way to the Best Seller List and a Pulitzer Prize” (1). This dependence on a “good” review—and in this case I mean one which contains nothing but praise for the book, regardless of its merit—creates a problem for the other three groups involved in the reviewing process: the journal editors, the reviewers, and the readers. Many are also writers themselves, so they have built-in sympa­ thies for other writers trying to make good in the literary world. They also have vested interests in the publishing world; they certainly do not want to alienate a potential publisher whom they might someday want to approach with a manuscript. Editors must perform a juggling act in their solicitation, acceptance, and editing of reviews. They must keep in mind such technicalities as the journal’s format and space constraints, the frequency of an author’s or reviewer’s name in a particular issue, and the grammatical correctness of the writing in the reviews. In addition, they must make editorial decisions based on more abstract considerations such as the book’s potential standing in scholarly circles, the journal’s reputation in the academic community, the changing needs and interests of the journal’s readers, and developments in the literary world in general. Most readers of literary journals are scholars with a general interest in literature and a more focused interest in some narrower field such as a particular region, genre, topic or author. Considering the increasing demands on time and energy today’s scholars face, and the concurrent increase in the number of books published each year,1even the most dedi­ cated of readers faces “a monumental task that may become well-nigh impossible before long” (Budd 363). Readers must depend on reviews in scholarly journals for information and evaluation of...