Adolescent reading and the reproduction of literary judgement

What adolescent book reviews of self-selected texts reveal

Abstract

This article reports on a qualitative pilot study that focussed on book reviews by adolescent readers in which they write about self-selected books and in which they provide information about the effects of reading as well as their literary judgements. A selection of 55 reviews from a corpus of 450 reviews on the Swiss internet site www.jugendbuchtipp.ch was analysed. After (1) initial considerations on literary reading, reading pleasure, and literary judgement, as well as an (2) introduction to the questions and the overall analytic approach, analyses are presented of the reviews that adolescent readers have written about “their” books. These analyses give clear indication of the coexistence of these adolescent readers' (3) emotional engagement; (4) their willingness to take on the perspective of literary figures; and (5) their partly sensitive perception of the formal features of texts. In their reviews of these autonomously selected books (that in many cases are examples of undemanding literature) there are in fact traces of the ability to form literary judgement. The (6) brief considerations regarding literature didactics emphasise the significance of autonomously selected texts for the development of reading pleasure and the ability to deliver literary criticism. They also underline the knowledge that book reviews offer about reading processes and processes of literary judgement.