Search

Sensitivity reading (SR)--the expert, ameliorative assessment of literary texts for superficial, inaccurate, or degradative depictions of oppressed groups-is a hotly contested service in the book industry, one that some hold is censorious. This article explicates how these detractors' critiques function as informal suppression, drawing inspiration from Joanna Russ to expose key rhetorical strategies that reinforce a pernicious distinction between 'literary' insiders and 'nonliterary' outsiders. The construction and propagation of this distinction ultimately encodes minoritized editors as 'sensitive readers' who constitute a threat to the literary enterprise itself, thereby rationalizing their continued marginalization on aesthetic grounds. KEYWORDS: sensitivity reading, intellectual freedom, book industry, rhetoric, social justice, In a nominally egalitarian society the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the 'wrong' group have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant [...]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine how we ought to distinguish between reference and readers' advisory (RA) service, given the latter's turn toward a whole collection approach. In other words, the paper answers this question: If both reference and RA librarians aim to meet patrons' information needs and may theoretically do so using the same materials, then how are we to differentiate the two services conceptually? Design/methodology/approach: In this conceptual paper, we posit that we can distinguish between RA and reference using Louise Rosenblatt's theory of the aesthetic transaction. With this theory in hand, we can redefine the service distinction in terms of the stance – aesthetic or efferent – that the patron expects to take toward the material they seek. Findings: On our account, the reader's desired stance becomes a kind of hermeneutical lens through which a library worker may productively evaluate plausible pathways and materials. An aesthetic lens is characteristic of RA; it makes features of potential aesthetic transactions between a particular reader and a particular text (or genre or author's oeuvre) salient. Originality/value: The proposed account constitutes a novel application of Rosenblattian response theory, one that grounds and refines the going view that RA's proper focus is on supporting a particular sort of experience rather than providing particular sorts of texts. This theoretical emendation also better aligns the service distinction with contemporary conceptualizations of RA as a "whole collection" service. Important practical and philosophical implications follow from the new account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Diverse books is a fundamentally political concept that performs particular normative work in discursive space. Part I of this project demonstrated that this was the case, further claiming that descriptive conceptual analysis was therefore methodologically inadequate to the task of defining the term. The purpose of this paper – Part II of II – is to advance a universal account of diverse books using an alternative form of conceptual analysis designed to suit the needs and commitments of LIS scholarship. Design/methodology/approach: This paper proposes and deploys a new method called informational pragmatic analysis, through which one develops accounts of political concepts in terms of their legitimate aims and benefits vis-à-vis informational justice. Findings: Diverse books are those systematically devalorized literary works we must make an ameliorative effort to promote in order to advance informational justice for oppressed persons in particular. These works exist on a contextually specific spectrum of moral urgency. A critical task for the diverse books movement is therefore to determine through democratic deliberation which (types of) books are most urgently in need of promotion under varying sociopolitical conditions. Originality/value: In addition to proposing a new analytical methodology for LIS, the paper articulates and defends a pragmatic account of diverse books that resists regressive misappropriation. This further lays the groundwork for future critical interrogations of the activities of various agents and agencies of print, both within and beyond the library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]