Discipline and Gender: Constructing Rhetorical Identity in Book Reviews

In review genres the control of evaluative resources is central to both effective writing and authorial identity. The ways in which writers judge others’ work and express these judgements in their texts not only signals what they think, but also who they are, displaying both their status as disciplinary insiders and their individual competences and values. In other words, and in an important sense, we are what we write, and what we write in review texts is a discursive construction of self through evaluation. In this chapter we explore the role of gender and discipline in the performance of such an academic identity by examining a corpus of reviews, written by men and women, in the contrasting fields of philosophy and biology. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.