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

12Firstly, I will draw on topics related to the current literature on genre analysis, andrelated disciplines including rhetoric, philosophy, and sociology of the sciences.Secondly, I will resort to the information collected in the interviews with book revieweditors of academic journals and in the texts in the corpus. And finally, I will use theinformation obtained in a survey of the practices usually adopted in book reviewing inthe three fields. This last survey was developed to collect data about who writes reviewsand when or in what languages and which countries books are published, and so on, as away to gain insight on the ways the genre is adopted across disciplines.In the traditional division of academic fields, the Humanities (as represented bylinguistics), the Natural Sciences (chemistry), and the Social Sciences (economics) areseen as responding to different epistemological needs and constraints and so are likely tohave different characteristics regarding values and knowledge structures. Thus, ananalysis of these two sets of features, i.e., field-invariant and field-dependent features, isexpected to help delineate a common framework for the genre of book reviews and, atthe same time, detect connections between text variation and context. It seems that bothperspectives –– invariant and dependent features –– should be taken into account if wewant to have an encompassing account of how the genre of academic book reviewswork.The underlying assumption here is that disciplinary groups observe genericconventions but also construct variations in genre in response to specific epistemicconditions in their fields, involving object of study, methodology and values of thediscipline. The book review will be analyzed here across disciplinary boundaries as a