universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

103The discussion in the present chapter raises interesting questions concerningdifferences in book reviewing practices among disciplines. If BRs respond to the needsof science for evaluation and validation of scientific literature, then variations in featuressuch as frequency and criteria for evaluation and description signal different disciplinarypractices in using the same genre in particular ways. If that is indeed the case, then a)this variation can be expected to appear mirrored in text content and format, particularlyin those passages in which reviewers describe and evaluate specific features of the bookthat are specially relevant for the field, and b) such variation has to be taken into accountby text analysts and academic reading and writing teachers in order to adapt analyticaland teaching procedures to a given field.So far, I have explored connections between the cultural environment in thedisciplines and text content and format. As I attempted to show from the editors’interviews, different disciplinary communities using the same genre can producedifferent configurations of surface text features. The question to be investigated herethen is to what extent these generalizations based on editors’ intuitions and experiencesin book reviewing are maintained in actual exemplars of the genre, especially if analysisof text features in BRs goes across disciplinary boundaries. In relation to evaluation, it ispossible that the analysis of the corpus of this study show a continuum between highlyevaluative and highly descriptive texts across disciplines. In that respect, Drewry’s(1966) conception of BRs as ranging from more subjective/judicial to moreobjective/impressionistic texts may be still valid as a classificatory scheme.