A construção social do gênero resenha acadêmica

Abstract

The concept of genre as postulated by Bakthin (1986) can be defined as a recurrent communicative event in which a given human activity, encompassing social roles and social relations, is mediated bylanguage. In this sense, genre presupposes an interconnection between textual (language) and contextual features (the set of soail relations involved). From a social perspective of genre (Ivanic, 1998:77), the present paper aims at discussing book reviews in English from the standpoint of three book review editors working in journals in the three disciplines of linguistics, chemistry, and economics. The focus of attention is the discursive practices in the North-American university context and how they respond to cultural factors that determine who should or can write what to whom. The interviews with the three book review editors reveal the hegemonic character of academic interactions and how it is construed and maintained through discourse and academic literacies.