Jim English - Lecture

Like all cultural fields today, the literary world is rife with ratings and rankings. And of all our many devices for measuring and comparing the value of literary works, none is so ubiquitous as the one- to five-star ratings generated by online search-and-shop sites like Google and Amazon or dedicated booklover platforms like StoryGraph and Goodreads. The habit of using stars and fractions of stars to express cultural value dates back some two hundred years, and the system has been used to rate works of literature for more than a century. But over the course of that span, star ratings have undergone a fundamental shift, to the point where today they serve almost the opposite function from that for which they were originally intended. In this talk, Jim English will reconstruct the history of star ratings as a tool of literary judgment, highlighting their transformation from marks of distinction to marks of distaste