A literary playground: Literary criticism and balance theory

One of the central tenets in an institutional approach to literary criticism is the hypothesis that literary evaluation is a social process guided by institutional norms and constraints. Literary quality is not just hidden within a text; critics and other members of the literary field assign quality to texts. Previous judgements on the text, its author or on previous titles by the author, influence the evaluation of a text. Literary criticism is supposed to be orchestrated. In this article, orchestration of literary criticism is studied from the perspective of social-psychological balance theory. Balance theory states that people tend to adjust their affections to affections expressed by or attributed to other people. As a result, affective relations display predictable patterns which reflect group structure. Network analysis identifies these patterns and can be used to investigate group structure. Applied to Dutch literary criticism in the 1970s, it is found that literary judgements published in reviews and interviews comply with balance theory in certain periods. In those periods, authors' and critics' evaluations interact. Their judgements reflect factions, ranking, and cleavages within the literary field, which, to some extent, mirror literary movements and prestige as well as the structure of society at large.

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