BOJANA PETRIĆ

Scholarly criticism in a small academic community: A diachronic study of book reviews in the oldest Serbian scholarly journal1

1. Introduction

As philosophers and sociologists of science (e.g., Kuhn 1964; Latour 1987) and applied linguists (e.g., Bazerman 1988; Hyland 2000; Martín-Martín & Burgess 2004; Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Pabón Berbesí 2007; Salager-Meyer 2010) have shown, disagreement and conflict are driving forces in the development of scholarship, making scholarly criticism a cornerstone of academic discourse. Criticism is pervasive in scholarly writing regardless of the genre, discipline, language and national academic culture; however, it varies considerably across these parameters. Studies of criticism in different genres, such as abstracts (Martín-Martín & Burgess 2004), research articles (Burgess & Fagan 2002), and book reviews (hereafter: BR) (Hyland 2000; Moreno & Suárez 2008b; Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Pabón Berbesí 2007) as well as comparative studies of

1 This research was conducted thanks to the Research Incentive Grant, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex. I also wish to thank the British Academy for enabling me to present a version of this paper at the American Association for Applied Linguistics conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2010. Thanks are also due to the editors of this volume and Nigel Harwood for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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criticism in different genres (Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza 2003, and Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza, this volume) show that criticism tends to be more direct and personal in genres such as editorials and BRs, whose main function is to critically examine an issue or scholarly work, while it is more hedged and indirect in research articles, where evaluation of other scholars’ work helps writers create a research space for their own contribution (Swales 1990). Criticism also varies across disciplines. As Hyland’s (2000) study of criticism in research articles from eight different disciplines shows, social science scholars tend to be more critical than scholars in hard sciences. Different national academic cultures also have their preferred ways of expressing scholarly criticism. For instance, in a comparison of criticism in research article abstracts in English and Spanish in phonetics and psychology, Martín-Martín and Burgess (2004) found differences not only in the frequency of criticism, with abstracts in English containing more instances of criticism than those written in Spanish, but also in the manner of its expression, with criticism in English tending to be impersonal and indirect, in contrast to the personal and direct criticism in Spanish abstracts. Similar findings resulted from Giannoni’s study (2005) of criticism in the discussion section of linguistics research articles in Italian and English. Duszak (1997) also found lower frequencies of criticism in Polish academic discourse in comparison with English, but unlike Spanish and Italian, Polish criticism tended to be more indirect in comparison to criticism in English. Salager-Meyer and Alcaraz Ariza’s (2004) comparison of criticism (or negative appraisal, as the authors refer to it) in English, French and Spanish medical BRs revealed a number of culturally based differences, such as the use of sarcasm, humour and irony in Spanish criticism and the tendency of French criticism to be personal.

Adding another dimension, diachronic studies of scholarly criticism, such as a series of studies by Salager-Meyer and colleagues, have focussed on changes in the frequency, positions, level of directness and targets of scholarly criticism in different national and disciplinary academic communities over time. This body of work suggests that while some changes are shared among different communities, others vary from one community to another. For instance, in a study comparing criticism in English, French and

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Spanish medical articles between 1930 and 1995, Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza and Zambrano (2003) found that, overall, articles in French and Spanish contained more criticism than articles in English, and that French and Spanish criticism was more often expressed directly. However, the diachronic perspective of the study showed that French and Spanish criticism developed differently over time, with Spanish criticism moving towards the more hedged expression of criticism similar to that in English, while French criticism did not undergo such a change. In another study, which examined criticism in medical BRs written in French journals in the last decades of the 19th

and 20th centuries, Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza and Pabón Berbesí (2007) found an increase in the numbers of uncritical BRs in the last decade of the 20th century in French, which is certainly not the case with BRs in English (Hyland 2000). The same study, however, found a parallel development in criticism in French and Spanish BRs (Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza 2004) in terms of the targets of criticism (i.e., aspects of the book criticised, such as style), which vary across historical periods in both academic cultures. Such differences need to be interpreted in light of the larger socio-cultural factors impacting on the academic community and its discourses.

This body of research inspired the present study of scholarly criticism in Serbian academic discourse, which has not been explored from this perspective so far. The evolution of Serbian scholarly criticism will be traced through the analysis of a sample of BRs, a genre evaluative by definition. As BRs involve “a direct, personal, public and often critical encounter with a particular text” (Salager-Meyer, Ariza Alcaraz & Pabón Berbesí 2007:1771), they represent a fertile ground for a study of criticism and the various strategies used to soften it. In terms of the historical development of the genre and the role of criticism in it, diachronic studies reported in Hyland (2000) and Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Pabón Berbesí (2007) indicate that the primary function of the first BRs in the mid-seventeenth century was to describe the content of new books. As titles proliferated, BRs gradually evolved into an evaluative genre more concerned with discussion and evaluation of content. This study will establish whether the same trajectory is found in BRs in Serbian.

Research has also found that criticism generally occurs less

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frequently than praise in contemporary BRs, although in some disciplines, such as philosophy and sociology (Hyland 2000), the opposite seems to be the norm. While praise tends to focus on the global aspects of the work reviewed, criticism tends to target specific issues (Hyland 2000; Moreno & Suárez 2008a, 2008b). In terms of its position in the BR, criticism is typically clustered in the body of the text, and while it is rarely found in final positions in English BRs (Hyland 2000), this is not the case with French BRs (Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Pabón Berbesí 2007). Criticism is also often mitigated by rhetorical strategies that maintain collegiality among scholars, such as hedges (Hyland, 2000), a feature that has been studied in relation to politeness in academic writing (Myers 1989; Johnson 1992), and which is particularly important in a genre that is “more face-threatening […] than the research paper genre” (Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Pabón Berbesí 2007: 1768). All of these parameters of criticism, i.e., frequency, targets, position, and mitigation strategies, will be investigated in a corpus of Serbian academic BRs. It is particularly interesting to study criticism in a small academic community, such as Serbian, where many academic conventions, including those governing expressions of criticism, may be affected by the size of the national academic community (Duszak 1997; Moreno & Suárez 2008a; Lorés Sanz 2009; Shaw & Vassileva 2009), as scholars are likely to know each other personally.

In diachronic studies involving a single language, texts can be sampled from a variety of journals in the same discipline from different historical periods, as in Salager-Meyer’s (1999) study of medical discourse in English, based on texts from 34 American and British journals; or they may come from a single journal, such as Bazerman’s (1988) study of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Atkinson’s (1992) study of medical research writing in the Edinburgh Medical Journal or Shaw’s (2004) study of BRs in the London Economic Journal. The present study focuses on a single humanities journal, Letopis Matice Srpske (LMS), the Annals of Matica Srpska, the oldest continuing scholarly journal in the Serbian language. With only short periods of interruptions in publication since its establishment in 1824 (1835-1836, 1848-1849, and during WWI and WWII), the LMS offers an excellent opportunity

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to investigate changes in Serbian scholarly discourse over time.The aim of the study, then, is to trace the evolution of Serbian

scholarly criticism by comparing criticism in BRs published in the LMS during three historical periods, i.e., 1900-1909, 1950-1959, and 2000-2009. More specifically, the study will determine whether there are any changes in the following: i) the frequency of criticism, ii) the position of criticism within the BR, iii) the proportion of mitigated vs. unmitigated instances of criticism, iv) mitigation strategies, and v) the issues targeted. I will also examine whether the expression of criticism varies according to the nationality of the author of the book under review (hereafter: author), i.e., whether books by local and foreign authors are critiqued differently.

2. Historical background

2.1. The journal

The LMS was founded in 1824 in Budapest, then the Austrian (Habsburg) Empire, by the intellectual elite of the Serbian ethnic minority. Its aim was to inform the growing Serbian middle class in Austria and elsewhere of the latest developments in Serbian and Slavic studies. Such a conception, common to the periodicals in Central Europe at the time of national awakening (Pogačnik 1976), led to a broad representation of different disciplines within the humanities, particularly history and literature but also philosophy, ethnography and law, with a unifying focus on Slavic and/or Serbian topics. The journal has specialised in studies of literature and literary criticism, although texts relating to broader areas within the humanities remain within its scope until today. Initially an annual publication, the LMS has gradually developed into a monthly journal (quarterly from 1880, bi-monthly from 1901, and monthly from 1910). Its centre of publication moved to Novi Sad in 1864, then in Austro-Hungary, today in Serbia. Its status has also varied throughout history. According to the latest categorisation of journals by the Serbian

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Ministry of Science and Technological Development, it is classified as a scholarly journal but not as a leading national journal (Ministry of Science and Technological Development 2010).

2.2. The emergence of book reviews in the LMS

The first BRs emerge on the pages of the LMS, albeit sporadically, in the 1830s. There are two types of texts that can be considered as antecedents to the BR: short bibliographical notes and longer analyses, which echoes Salager-Meyer’s (2010) findings about 19th century medical BRs in English. Bibliographic notes consist of a few lines providing basic information about the book’s content, typically in a neutral manner. They sometimes include general evaluative comments or expressions of personal attitude, such as “We salute this publication with great enthusiasm2” or “We thank the author for this fine work”.

The other type of early BR was the so-called ‘recensio’, a long and detailed analysis of a book, often providing a point-by-point analysis, with citations from the work followed by the reviewer’s comment. Such texts are not devoid of criticism; on the contrary, the criticism is often harsh, personal and even sarcastic, as in the following two examples from 1853:

(1) Prve reči, koje u samom delu nalazimo, su: […]. Vidim li ja to dobro? Ta nije moguće, da se tako što napisati i štampati može!The first words we find in the work are: [cited sentence]. Do I see this well? It cannot be true that something like this can be written and published!

(2) G. [autor] nije opet svoje rođene oči upotrebio. On je nešto negde čitao, drugo zapamtio, a treće sada napisao. Mr [author’s name] did not use his own eyes. He read something somewhere, remembered something else, and has now written something completely different.

2 All translations from Serbian to English are mine.

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Salager-Meyer (2010) also found that criticism in 19th century medical BRs in English tended to be personal, direct and provocative. In his book about the history of Serbian literary criticism, Živković (1957) states that the first half of the 19th century was marked by criticism that often bordered on personal attack. This provoked a debate on the role of criticism, in which two sides can be identified: some held that criticism should be positive and supportive in order to help the young national literature grow and reach the ranks of more developed nations, while others thought that, without being frank and if necessary negative, criticism cannot perform its role in helping individual authors and national scholarship as a whole to improve. According to Živković (1957), it is only in the 1850s that criticism rooted in the principles of literary theory emerges. Although Živković is primarily concerned with literary criticism, this point is relevant to the discussion of academic criticism in BRs as well, since the terms ‘literary’ and ‘literature’ in the 19th century were understood more broadly as any published work, including both literary and academic works (Tartalja 1976).

Although interesting, this period was not included in the present study since BRs do not become a regular feature of the journal until the 1870s. Even then, due to the small number of volumes, the 19th

century as a whole does not provide a sufficiently large number of BRs for the purposes of this comparative study.

2.3. Overview of the three historical periods

BRs were sampled from three ten-year periods, fifty years apart: 1900-1909, 1950-1959 and 2000-2009. This periodisation was motivated by methodological concerns to sample texts systematically, in regular intervals long enough to capture possible changes. Equally importantly, however, it takes into account various external factors that may have impacted on the nature of the data, such as the interruptions or reduced intensity in publication in certain periods and changes in borders and ideological orientations. The resulting periodisation, covering the pre-WWI period, the post-WWII period, and the period after the break-up of Yugoslavia, enables a contrastive

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study of three historically very different periods in Serbian history, which had an important influence on the academic community.

2.3.1. Period A: 1900-1909

In the first decade of the 20th century the cultural and scholarly production in the Serbian language is centred both in Austro-Hungary and in Serbia, which gained independence in 1878; however, the dominance begins to gravitate towards Serbia, where major national institutions of scholarship are established (Milisavac 2000), such as the Serbian Royal Academy for science and arts (1886) and the University of Belgrade (1905). In this period, the LMS is a journal for discussion of contemporary social issues, with particular emphasis on literature, literary and historical studies. One of its editors at the time describes its readership as educated non-experts, more interested in reading works that synthesise scientific achievements than original research studies.

Among the regular features of the journal, BRs have a prominent role, with a rather large section at the back of the journal, which is divided into sub-sections by discipline (literature, history, philology, theology, and emerging disciplines such as pedagogy). Each issue brings a dozen or so BRs, presenting books written by Czech, Croatian, German, Hungarian, French, Romanian, Russian and Serbian authors, in a variety of languages. For the first time, the LMS publishes two reviews of the same work in the same issue (Milisavac 2000), which suggests that diversity of perspectives has editorial support. Individual BRs do not have proper titles; rather, titles of the books reviewed serve as titles of BRs. The full names of reviewers are not provided; only their initials are given. This is standard practice at the time in BRs in English as well (Salager-Meyer 2010).

2.3.2. Period B: 1950-1959

In the 1950s the orientation of the journal changes considerably as it now aims to become a regional research-oriented literary journal. The journal is no longer concerned with ‘Serbian’ topics only, but adopts a multicultural perspective, focusing on the literary production of various ethnic groups living in the northern region of Serbia

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(Vojvodina) and, more generally, of Yugoslavia as a whole. Another important change refers to the ideological orientation: as Marxist approaches are now preferred in literary theory, works that do not adhere to Marxism risk being fiercely criticised.

The BR section continues to be a regular feature, although, as in the previous period, typographically separated from the rest of the journal i.e., printed in columns and in smaller font. The sub-sections of the previous period now disappear, possibly due to a more homogeneous disciplinary focus of the journal in this period. The number of reviewers, whose names are now provided in full, grows.

2.3.3. Period C: 2000-2009

After a period of turbulent political changes during the break-up of Yugoslavia, the literary community for which the LMS caters shrinks due to both changes in the borders and due to the unprecedented brain drain during the 1990s and 2000s. Today, the LMS defines itself as “a significant factor of national, scientific and cultural life of the Serbian people” and stresses its focus on the national cultural production “regardless of the old and new borders” (Letopis Matice Srpske, n.d.). This focus on the national, while attracting one group of scholars, has made other potential contributors and readers shun it at a time of strong divisions on the issue of national identity and nationalism.

In this period the BR section is an integral part of the journal, typographically undifferentiated from other sections. BRs are given titles (e.g., “Towards a poetics of a de-centring genre”), followed by the bibliographic details of the book under review.

3. Corpus and analysis

Thirty BRs3 were randomly selected from the LMS from each of the three periods. Only reviews about a single book were taken into account. The resulting corpus consists of 90 BRs, totalling 110,328

3 Titles are available upon request from bpetric@essex.ac.uk.

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running words. As can be seen from Table 1, the three sub-corpora were not equal in size since the BRs increased considerably in length over time, with a typical BR in the 2000s almost twice as long as a BR in the 1900s. Variation in length will be taken into account.

Period A(1900-1909)

Period B(1950-1959)

Period C(2000-2009)

Total

Total number of words 26,912 32,590 50,826 110,328Average length of BR 897.77 1086.93 1694.2 1225.87Range 278 - 1597 291 - 2521 602 – 3889 278 - 3889

Table 1. Description of the corpus

Only BRs about academic books were selected, while those reviewing literary works were excluded from analysis. The books reviewed are primarily concerned with literary studies (literary criticism, literary theory, history of literature), with BRs of books in this discipline accounting for 61% of the corpus (63% in periods A and C, and 57% in period B). However, due to the broad humanities focus of the journal, the corpus also includes BRs of works from other humanities, most notably history (20%) and philosophy (9%).

Criticism is defined in this study as disagreement or negative evaluation of any aspect of the book under review or its author. Instances where issues external to the book under review and/or its author (e.g., other authors/books or the context) are criticised were excluded from analysis. Criticism is identified as a semantic unit focusing on a single aspect of the book (following Hyland 2000, and Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Pabón Berbesí 2007), which may be realised as a single word, a phrase or a clause. The following examples were all coded as containing one instance of criticism since they all refer to a single aspect of the book under review (the letter in parentheses refers to the period covered):

(3) … prema [autorovom], možda pomalo nategnutom mišljenju…(C17)…according to [the author’s] perhaps somewhat far-fetched

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opinion… (C17)(4) Tvrdnja da […] nije ništa drugo do obična retorska figura

lišena svakog konkretnog sadržaja. (C6)The statement that […] is nothing but a simple rhetorical figure devoid of any concrete content. (C6)

(5) Ona su za nas od sporednog značaja, a mogla su doći u primedbama ispod teksta… (B2)They are of marginal importance for us and could have been listed in the footnotes … (B2)

Instances of criticism were located in texts manually and coded in terms of the following:

i) the position of the criticism in the text (i.e., initial, middle, final paragraph, final sentence),

ii) whether it was mitigated or not (i.e., whether the criticism was softened by using a mitigation strategy or expressed directly)

iii) if mitigated, what type of mitigation was used iv) the target of the criticism.

Mitigation strategies (point iii) were classified using a modified version of Hyland’s taxonomy (2000), which lists hedges, praise-criticism pairs, personal responsibility, other attribution, metadiscoursal bracketing and limited praise. Hedges include linguistic devices that weaken negative evaluation, such as epistemic modals (e.g., may) and approximators (e.g., somewhat). Praise-criticism pair is a rhetorical strategy consisting of providing praise prior to criticism, thus softening its force. Personal responsibility refers to instances where the book’s shortcomings are presented as the reviewer’s personal opinion rather than as an objectively determined fault or a widely shared opinion. Other attribution similarly reduces the strength of criticism by attributing it to others, most commonly the reader. Metadiscoursal bracketing refers to explicit signalling of criticism, which distances the reviewer from the negative evaluation expressed by introducing a different voice from the rest of the text. Finally, limited praise refers to indirect expression of criticism via positive evaluation offering less than what the reader expects, i.e., praise is limited to marginal aspects of the book thus implying

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criticism of its more relevant aspects. This classification was expanded to include two additional strategies found in the corpus of the present study, which I term euphemistic criticism and justification for the shortcoming on behalf of the author. Like limited praise, euphemistic criticism is an indirect strategy that relies on the reader’s inference by exploiting Gricean implicature. In contrast to limited praise, however, euphemistic criticism does not contain evaluation but relies on descriptive lexis, as in the example in Table 2, whose negative evaluative force only becomes apparent via inference (for other types of implied criticism, which have not been addressed here, see Shaw 2004). Providing a justification on behalf of the author offers an excuse for the author’s oversight or the work’s shortcoming and thus lessens the author’s responsibility for it. The following Table illustrates the taxonomy of mitigation strategies used in the study with examples from the corpus:

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Hedging Takođe, utisak je da je sadržaj mogao biti proširen pregledom literature… (C18)It is also an impression that the content could have been broadened by an overview of the literature… (C18)

Praise – criticism Pair

Izvođenje njegovo veoma je zanimljivo, ali na nekim mestima ne mnogo ubedljivo. (A5)His reasoning is very interesting, but in some places not entirely convincing. (A5)

Writer responsibility Pa i ti podaci koliko smo mogli videti nisu uvek tačni. (B2)Even those data, as far as we could see, are not always correct. (B2)

Other attribution …čitalac će joj već od prvih strana stavljati i usputne zamerke. (B15)…the reader will also be making incidental critical remarks about [the book] already from the first pages (B15)

Metadiscoursal bracketing

Ali knjiga ima i osetnih mana. (B5)But the book also has noticeable shortcomings. (B5)

Limited praise … dobro će doći svima onima koji budu znali da se njom kritički koriste. (B8)…[the book] will be useful to all those who know how to use it critically. (B8)

Euphemistic criticism

Fusnote na strani x date su na neuobičajen način. (B18)The footnotes on page x are presented in an unusual fashion. (B18)

Justification of the shortcoming

…dužan sam da skrenem pažnju na izvesne nejasnosti u njima [obaveštenjima iz knjige], koje su se, svakako, kao pogreške pera, potkrale piscu. (B18)…it is my duty to point to certain unclear points in [the information provided in the book], which have certainly crept into the author’s text as slips of the pen. (B18)

Table 2. Taxonomy of mitigation strategies (adapted from Hyland 2000)

Targets of criticism (point iv) were classified according to a modified version of Hyland’s (2000) taxonomy of categories of evaluation, which divides them into general content, specific content, style, readership, text, author, and publishing. The category of translation/translator was added to this list, as it is particularly relevant to small academic communities, which rely to a large extent on

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translations of works from other languages. It is important to treat translation-related issues as a separate category of evaluation since a translation of a book may be criticised even when the original is praised, and vice versa. Salager-Meyer and Alcaraz Ariza (2004: 165) also found a number of criticisms targeting translation-related issues in Spanish BRs in their corpus. Table 3 shows examples of each target of criticism from the corpus:

General content Rezimirano, publikacija [naslov], imajući u vidu njenu namenu, daje vrlo nepotpun pregled [teme] i sadrži još usto i niz netačnih podataka. (B21)To summarise, the publication [title], having in mind its aim, gives a very incomplete overview of [the topic]; in addition, it contains a series of inaccuracies. (B21)

Specific content Međutim, o ulozi […] [autor] ne govori dovoljno. (B9)However, [the author] does not talk sufficiently about the role of… (B9)

Style Osim toga bi njegovim memoarskim radovima mnogo koristila i veća zbijenost i konciznost izlaganja. (A3)In addition, his memoir work would benefit considerably from greater compactness and conciseness of exposition. (A3)

Readership Sve bi to, mislimo, moglo interesovati strane pozorišne stručnjake kojima je ova publikacija u prvom redu namenjena. (B21)All this [omitted content], we think, could be of interest to foreign theatre scholars, who this publication is primarily aimed at. (B21)

Text Zašto se jedno isto ime nalazi u katalogu na tri razna načina? (B2)Why is the same name spelt in three different ways in the catalogue? (B2)

Author Ipak je čudnovato da pisac često pokazuje neznanje najobičnijih stvari… (A18) Nevertheless, it is odd that the author often shows ignorance of the most common things... (A18)

Publishing Među ilustracijama nema… (B21)Among the illustrations, […] is missing (B21)

Translation / Translator

No prevodilac ne zna…(A30)However, the translator does not know… (A30)

Table 3. Taxonomy of targets of criticism (adapted from Hyland 2000)

The final step in the analysis concerned the relationship between the

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nationality of the author whose work is reviewed and the parameters of criticism listed above. For the purposes of this study, it was sufficient to determine whether the author and the reviewer had the same nationality (i.e., Serbian in periods A and C, Yugoslav in period B), whereas determining the actual nationality of foreign authors (e.g., French or Russian) was irrelevant to the analysis. Judgements were made on the basis of the authors’ name, affiliation, language in which the work was published and place of publication as well as the information provided in the BRs themselves (e.g., reference to ‘our author’ or ‘the German scholar’). In case of local authors, many were names familiar to any educated speaker of Serbian. Books by Serbian/Yugoslav authors published in foreign languages by publishing houses abroad were not treated as foreign.

To ensure reliability of the analysis, 10% of the total corpus (9 BRs) was independently coded by a literary scholar, who is also a speaker of Serbian. There were no disagreements in terms of identifying critical and uncritical BRs and locating instances of criticism. However, there were some disagreements about their classification and their boundaries, which were discussed and resolved. Inter-rater reliability was acceptable (.87).

Raw numbers of instances of criticism were normalised per 1000 words to enable comparison of the three groups of texts regardless of their length.

4. Results and discussion

4.1. Critical vs. uncritical BRs

As Table 4 shows, the number of critical BRs, i.e., those containing at least one instance of criticism, has considerably decreased over time. The decrease is dramatic in the 2000s, when uncritical BRs outnumber critical ones as criticism occurs in only 33% of the BRs in the corpus. Although Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza and Pabón Berbesí (2007) also found an increase in uncritical BRs in French medical BRs, in

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their corpus the uncritical BRs do not outnumber the critical BRs in any period.

Period A(1900-1909)

Period B(1950-1959)

Period C(2000-2009)

Total in the whole corpus

CRITICAL BRs 73% 60% 33% 56%

BRs containing both praise and criticism (% of critical BRs)

91% 89% 100% 92%

BRs containing criticism only (% of critical BRs)

9% 11% 0 4%

Mean length of critical BRs (number of words)

892 1,259 2,478 1,543 (61%)

UNCRITICAL BRs 27% 40% 67% 44%

Neutral(% of uncritical BRs)

0 0 5% 2.5%

BRs containing praise only (% of uncritical BRs)

100% 100% 95% 97.5%

Mean length of uncritical BRs (number of words)

910 825 1,303 1,013

Table 4: Critical and uncritical BRs in the three periods

Most critical BRs in all three periods contain instances of both criticism and praise. Only 9% and 11% of the critical BRs in the 1900s and 1950s, respectively, are entirely critical, containing no instances of praise, while in the 2000s none of the BRs in the corpus are completely critical. As for the uncritical BRs, they tend to be laudatory, containing only (often lavish) praise and no instances of criticism. Only one completely neutral BR was found in the whole corpus, in period C.

The distinction between critical and uncritical BRs displays an interesting relationship to BR word length. Critical and uncritical BRs are almost equal in length in the 1900s, but in the two later periods critical BRs are considerably longer than uncritical BRs. The greater length of critical BRs may be related to the fact that most critical BRs

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contain instances of praise in addition to criticism, while uncritical BRs mainly praise but do not criticise the book under review and are therefore shorter.

4.2. Frequency of criticism

A total of 497 instances of criticism were identified in the corpus. Although the number of instances of criticism is the largest in period B (260), the normalisation of raw frequencies per 1000 words to avoid the effect of the difference in BR length shows that, in fact, period A contains the largest numbers of instances of criticism per 1000 words of the total corpus for that period, as shown in Table 5:

Period A(1900-1909)

Period B(1950-1959)

Period C(2000-2009)

Total

Instances of criticism 170 260 67 497

Per 1000 words in critical BRs 10.2 10.9 3.3 7.4

Per 1000 words of the total corpus

7.5 6.6 1.1 4.5

Table 5. Frequencies of criticism

To determine whether the difference in the frequencies of criticism in the three periods is statistically significant, the Kruskal-Wallis test was used. The result was significant at probability level p= .0001. A series of post-hoc Mann-Whitney tests was then run on all pairs of the three groups to determine which pairs were significantly different. There was a significant difference between period A and period C (p= .0002) and between period B and period C (p=.0078), while no significant difference was found between periods A and B. Thus, it can be concluded that the frequency of criticism in BRs published in the 2000s is significantly lower than in the earlier two periods.

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4.3. Positions of criticism

In all three periods, criticism is most commonly found in the main body of the BR text, followed by the conclusion (see Table 6). BRs rarely open with a critical remark; if they do, this tends to be the case with BRs that are predominantly critical throughout the text. Opening and closing positions are typically occupied by global evaluations of the work under review; therefore, criticism in these positions implies an overall negative assessment. The clustering of criticism in the middle part of the BR allows the writer to soften the critique in the final paragraph of the BR thus ending on a positive note. Another pattern is the location of criticism in the final paragraph, followed by praise as a mitigation device in the very last sentence. In that respect, it is noteworthy that, in contrast to the 1900s and the 1950s, in the 2000s there are no instances of criticism in the final sentence of the BR. This was also the case in Salager-Meyer’s (2010) corpus of medical BRs in English from the 1990s. The findings are also in line with Hyland’s (2000) study of BRs in eight disciplines, which showed that only 3% of BR started with criticism, and less than 20% ended on it.

Period A(1900-9)

Period B(1950-9)

Period C(2000-9)

Total

Initial 5% 0.4% 2% 2%

Middle 66% 85% 73% 77%

Final paragraph 22% 11% 25% 17%

Final sentence 7% 3% 0% 4%

Table 6. Positions of criticism expressed as percentages

4.4. Direct vs. mitigated criticism and related mitigation strategies

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The analysis shows that in the 1900s and 1950s BR writers tended to express criticism directly, whereas in the 2000s they give preference to mitigated criticism, which softens the critical edge. This historical development is similar to that found in Spanish medical BRs, where a decrease in the percentage of direct criticism was noted in the 1990s, although, unlike in the Serbian case, it remained higher than the percentage of indirect criticism (Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Zambrano 2003). Table 7 shows that the highest proportion of direct criticism (65%) was found in the 1950s. Salager-Meyer (2010) also found criticism in the mid-20th century English medical BRs to be polemical and harsh. Another detail that deserves to be highlighted is the sharpness of the decrease in the percentage of direct criticism in the 2000s from 65% to 36%. Data for the 2000s show a striking similarity to English: in Hyland’s (2000) corpus of BRs, more than 65% of all instances of criticism were mitigated, an almost identical percentage to that of mitigated criticism in the LMS for period C.

Period A(1900-1909)

Period B(1950-1959)

Period C(2000-2009)

Total

Direct CR 56% 65% 36% 42%

Mitigated 44% 35% 64% 58%

Table 7. Direct and mitigated criticism expressed as percentages

To determine the statistical significance of these differences, two series of statistical tests were run, as described earlier, for mitigated and unmitigated instances of criticism, respectively. It was shown that there was no significant difference in the number of instances of either mitigated or unmitigated criticism between periods A and B. However, the difference was significant for both mitigated and unmitigated criticism between periods A and C (p=.0066 for mitigated criticism and p=.008 for unmitigated criticism) and between periods B and C (p=.0239 for mitigated criticism and p=.0107 for unmitigated criticism). This confirms that an important change in the level of

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directness of criticism occurred between the 1950s and the 2000s.The analysis further focuses on the mitigation strategies used

to soften the criticism, whose importance, as can be seen, grows in the most recent period. It is shown that an array of devices was used in all three periods. All the types in the taxonomy are found in all three periods of the corpus. There are also instances where multiple mitigation strategies are used with a single instance of criticism, as in the following example, where criticism is preceded by praise but is also hedged (“not entirely convincing”):

(6) Izvođenje njegovo veoma je zanimljivo, ali na nekim mestima ne mnogo ubedljivo. (A5)His reasoning is very interesting, but in some places not entirely convincing. (A5)

As can be seen from Table 8, the most common type of mitigation in all three periods is hedging. Hedges are particularly frequent in the BRs in the 2000s, when more than half of all mitigated instances of criticism are hedged. The second most frequent mitigation strategy in all three periods is the praise-criticism pair. Other mitigation strategies are also used in all three periods with lower frequencies.

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Period A(1900-1909)

Period B(1950-1959)

Period C(2000-2009)

Total

Hedging 42% 28% 56% 39%

Praise – Criticism Pair

34% 19% 35% 28%

Writer responsibility

8% 18% 7% 12%

Other attribution 16% 14% 16% 15%

Metadiscoursal bracketing

2% 14% 5% 8%

Limited praise 1% 9% 2% 5%

Euphemistic criticism

3% 11% 14% 10%

Justification of the shortcoming

1% 7% 7% 5%

Table 8. Mitigation strategies expressed as percentages

4.5. Targets of criticism

The results in Table 9 show that the majority of critical acts in all three periods were aimed at specific issues related to the content of works under review. This is similar to Hyland’s (2000) findings about targets of criticism in contemporary BRs written in English. Although this focus on specific content issues remains constant throughout the three periods, there are also some interesting differences. For instance, issues related to style (i.e., composition, clarity, conciseness) become more important over time, while those related to textual issues (i.e., referencing, glossary) decrease in importance. It is also interesting that criticism targeting the author completely disappears in the 2000s, showing that criticism has become less personal, and thus less face-threatening.

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Period A(1900-1909)

Period B(1950-1959)

Period C(2000-2009)

Total

General content 12% 13% 7% 12%

Specific content 51% 50% 61% 53%

Style 3% 13% 15% 11%

Readership 0.6% 2% 1% 1%

Text 11% 8% 4% 8%

Author 15% 7% 0 9%

Publishing 2% 7% 0 4%

Translation 6% 0.4% 0 2%

Table 9. Targets of criticism expressed as percentages

4.6. Nationality of the author of the book under review

As stated in the introduction, one of the factors affecting the expression of criticism in small academic communities may be the fact that authors and reviewers are likely to know each other personally. Therefore, it seemed worthwhile to take into account the nationality of the author in all three periods in order to check whether reviewers critique books by local and foreign authors in different ways. Although focusing on national academic culture takes into account only one dimension of academic community membership, whereas other allegiances, such as school of thought or research paradigm are excluded, support for investigating the national aspect of membership was found in the description of the focus and aims of LMS itself. In Period A and C the aims of the journal foreground the national, i.e., Serbian, aspect. However, due to political and historical changes outlined in Section 2, the definition of nationality changed

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over time. Thus in period B the community is defined within a larger national framework, i.e., Yugoslav rather than Serbian.

Period A(1900-1909)

Period B(1950-1959)

Period C(2000-2009)

Total

BRs about books by Serbian / Yugoslav authors

47% 97% 100% 81%

BRs about books by foreign authors

53%(including 6% in translation)

3% 0 19%

Table 10. Proportions of BRs of books by Serbian/Yugoslav and foreign authors

The most important finding, displayed in Table 10, is that reviews of books written by foreign authors on some aspect of Serbian literature or history, while constituting the majority of BRs in the 1900s, are completely absent in the 2000s, despite the same focus of the journal in both periods on Serbian literary and historical topics. It is hard to imagine that there is no scholarly interest in such topics in today’s international academia, especially given recent history, which attracted scholarly attention. The absence of works by foreign authors among books reviewed in the LMS in the 2000s, either in translation or in the original languages, may be rather due to editorial concerns to prioritise reviews of works by members of the Serbian academic community published locally, whose numbers have mushroomed in comparison to the 1900s. This tendency to focus on national production only may also be part of a larger trend. As Frederiksson (2007) notes, while European literary criticism used to be marked by a cosmopolitan perspective in the past, today it tends to be “a very national affair”. Although he discusses BRs of literary works, the same may be true for BRs of scholarly works in literary studies. This, however, remains to be confirmed by further research.

Because of this finding, the relationship between the nationality of the author and the expressions of criticism can only be analysed in period A. Table 10 shows that slightly more than half of the BRs in the 1900s are reviews of works by foreign authors. These include 2

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translated works and a total of 14 works published in other languages: Russian (5), French (3), Croatian (2), Czech (2), German (2), and Hungarian (2). Of these BRs, 81% contain instances of criticism while only are 9% uncritical. There are instances of criticism in the corpus that explicitly highlight the foreignness of the authors whose work is reviewed, thus emphasizing the us/them dimension, as in:

(7) Nadali smo se da će nam možda koji zapadni podatak bolje objasniti ovo dosta nejasno mesto u […], ali nada nas je obmanula. (A13)We were hoping that some Western data would better explain this fairly unclear point in […], but hope has deceived us. (A13)

The ‘Western’ in this example hints at the superior status of scholarship in Western Europe, which, the reviewer points out, fails to prove its superiority in explaining this particular point. Examples of national stereotyping in the sphere of scholarship, i.e., cases where reviewers see the work as embodying the features they consider typical of the national scholarly tradition in the author’s country, are also present:

(8) Redak je [X] naučnik, koji će napisati, ma i o najneznatnijem predmetu malu raspravu. […] I prof. K. pati od te bolesti. (A18)It is rare to find a [nationality X] scholar who will write a short treatise even on a most insignificant topic. […] Professor K. too suffers from this malady. (A18)

In the following excerpt, the reviewer criticises the author for not having consulted Serbian scholarly literature when writing about a topic related to Serbian history. Note the reviewer’s use of the first person plural, which conveys a sense of the collective national ownership of the subject matter (‘our themes’, ‘our past’) and of the scholarly literature about it (‘our historical literature’):

(9) [Autor] mnogo se bavio našim stvarima i mnogo pisao o našoj

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prošlosti; stoga je zaista vrlo čudnovato, da tako slabo poznaje našu istorijsku literaturu. (…) Od onoga što je kod nas urađeno [na tu temu], [autor] nije gotovo ništa upotrebio, što je veliki nedostatak. (A18)[The author] has dealt a lot with our themes and has written a lot about our past; therefore, it is very strange indeed that he knows so little about our historical literature. (…) Of the works written here [i.e., by Serbian authors] on [the topic], [the author] used almost nothing, which is a great shortcoming. (A18)

Such instances of national rivalry were also found in French BRs of works by Anglo-American authors (Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza 2004; Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Pabón 2007).

As for BRs about books by Serbian authors in this period, the percentage of critical BRs is lower in this group (64%) in comparison to BRs of books by foreign authors (81%). Looking at the data from a different perspective, 37.5% of all uncritical BRs in the 1900s corpus are about books by foreign authors, while 62.5% are about works by Serbian authors. This suggests that writers tend to be more critical when the author is not a member of the same community. Interestingly, among the books by Serbian authors, 29% are published in German by Austrian or German publishers. These books seem to have a special status: their reviews do not contain any criticism, but rather tend to lavish praise on scholars whose work was recognised by international centres of scholarship.

5. Conclusion

This study of criticism in BRs in the oldest Serbian scholarly journal has shown that considerable changes have taken place in the frequencies and some other but not all parameters of criticism. The most surprising finding is the prevalence of uncritical BRs in the latest, still current, period. While an increase in uncritical BRs has

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also been noted by Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza and Pabón Berbesí (2007) in the case of French medical BRs in the last decades of the 19th and the 20th centuries, in their corpus uncritical BRs did not outnumber critical ones in either of the two periods. We can only speculate why this move towards avoidance of criticism is occurring in Serbian academic discourse in this particular journal. Several possible explanations can be offered. One may be found in the reduced size of the academic discourse community due to external factors, which may have resulted in BR writing becoming a potentially even more face-threatening act, as the author and the reviewer are likely to know each other personally. Hence, to avoid confrontation and as a way of self-protection, writers may resort to being less critical and focusing on the positive aspects of the work or choosing to contribute to the discussion of the topic instead. Analysis of the generic structure of BRs along the lines of Motta-Roth (1998) and Moreno and Suárez (2008b), from a diachronic perspective, would shed light on changes in the importance of different moves in BRs over time. Another explanation for the increase in uncritical BRs may be that the view of the role of criticism has changed in the community surrounding the journal in light of the changes in the larger society, leading to an increased need for social solidarity among members of a diminished community engaging in scholarly work. This reason may also explain the finding that in the latest period only locally published books are reviewed, while books by foreign authors and by Serbian authors publishing abroad are absent. Similarly to the debate in the 19th century about the role of criticism, the community surrounding the LMS may be more concerned with providing support to individual members at this time than with maintaining scholarly standards by providing criticism. While there is some evidence that the same trend can be observed in other national literary communities (see Frederiksson 2007), this explanation remains a hypothesis without further research involving interviews with editors, writers, and readers.

The decrease in the number of BRs containing criticism is not the only indicator of the tendency towards avoidance of criticism identified in this study. Another noticeable change in this direction is the decrease in the frequency of criticism in general as well as in

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direct and personal criticism (i.e., criticism targeting the author). What remains constant is the position of criticism in BRs, which tends to cluster in the middle sections of the BR, as in other languages. Another pattern common to all three periods is the preference for hedges and praise-criticism pairs as mitigation strategies. Finally, in all three periods the most common targets of critical acts are specific content points.

In comparison to diachronic changes of criticism in BRs in other languages, Serbian resembles peninsular Spanish in that in both academic cultures there is an increase in the number of instances of indirect criticism and decrease in direct ones in the most recent period (1990s for Spanish, and 2000s for Serbian); however, the comparison does not hold for other aspects of criticism. While this approximation to the English model may be explained as part of the globalisation of science in the case of Spanish medical BRs (Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza & Zambrano 2003), since medical journals are particularly affected by the conventions of English academic writing (for a review of the literature on L2 scholars’ publication in English, see Uzuner 2008), in the case of national humanities journals, such as the LMS, the reason for such changes may lie elsewhere. In the case of the LMS, in particular, the inward-looking tendency of the last period seems to rule out such an explanation. In addition, the diminishing presence of criticism is not in line with the English language model. A similar avoidance of criticism was found in peninsular Spanish but not British BRs in the 2000s in the field of history by Lorés Sanz (2009), who attributes this phenomenon to broader socio-cultural factors such as the size of the academic community, the scope of the distribution of the journal, and the differing understandings of the purpose of the BR genre in the two writing cultures.

Focusing on a small corpus from a single journal, this study is admittedly limited in scope. While such an approach has its advantages in diachronic studies as it provides continuity in terms of certain parameters of the corpus, its disadvantage is that some of the findings may be specific to the publication outlet rather than the academic community as a whole. Nevertheless, as a first study of Serbian academic discourse examining criticism in BRs from a diachronic perspective, it has revealed interesting patterns of change

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and has opened up questions for future research in this area. Further research is needed to determine whether changes identified in this study have occurred in BRs in Serbian journals in other humanities, life and hard sciences. Especially interesting would be to examine such trajectories in the numerous Serbian journals that have recently shifted to English and are thus likely to be more exposed to practices in English academic discourse. This study has also revealed interesting findings concerning the factor of author nationality, such as the tendency of BR writers to be less critical when the author belongs to the same national academic community. While data available on this issue are insufficient to make definite conclusions about the relationship between author nationality and the manner in which criticism is expressed, they suggest that further research on this topic is worthwhile.

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