| Abstract [eng] |
In recent decades, non-professional literary criticism has become popular on social media, but in Lithuania this phenomenon has received limited amount of scholarly reflection. Based on the methodology of literary sociology and Pierre Bourdieu's model of the literary field and the concepts of capital, illusio, the paper analyses the responses of 23 non-professional literary critics who post on Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads or personal blogs to a 13-question questionnaire, collected through a semi-structured interview. The aim of the paper is to identify respondents‘ working methods, motives, goals, self-concept, and attitudes towards other participants in the literary field. The study is divided into three sections: "How and why does one become a non-professional literary critic?", "Characteristics of non-professional literary critics' work" and "Sociality of non-professional literary critics". It showed that non-professional literary critics are a non-homogeneous group, with different professions but united by their higher education. Their personal and communicative motives (self-expression, the desire for community, the function of "memory", goal to promote books) suggest that non-professional literary criticism can act as an alternative to various literary activities: book clubs, literary diaries. Although literary critics are freer than professionals, and this is reflected in their choice of books, linguistic expression, and the content of their texts, they are confronted with the challenges and constraints of the media, the field, and their personal characteristics. The visual aspect of their work is of particular importance and is given special attention. This activity influences their reading and writing habits, encourages them to additionally reflect the book while reading and to mark the most important points. They make use of a variety of evaluation criteria: abstract and concrete. The latter are the same as those used by professionals. In their methods of operation, therefore, the respondents fall between ordinary readers and professional literary critics. Non-professional literary critics establish relationships with other participants of the field: they collaborate with publishers or authors to promote books, organise giveaways, gather their audience on social networks, and engage in polemics with critics. Of all these relationships, the most valued is the relationship with followers, which can be considered as social and symbolic capital. Respondents do not aspire to the role of a professional critic because of a lack of confidence in their competences, higher demands and constraints, suffiecient self-expression on social networks or because they have not been invited to do so. They identify themselves as readers. The work may be of interest to scholars of literary criticism. The main limitation of the work is the number of respondents - 23 respondents cannot fully represent such a broad phenomenon. Further research on this phenomenon is possible: quantitative, digital analysis of linguistic expression and stylistics, the impact on marketing, readers, literary trends (the phenomenon of 'Instagram' poetry), the attitudes of other participants in the field towards non-professional literary criticism. Literary criticism published in video format, such as the Booktok community on the TikTok social network, is also worthy of separate research. |
