Unitary Culture Demise

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, John Bowman, resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, hails the demise of "unitary culture". He cites the beginning of the end as 1974, when anonymous book reviews ended at the Times Literary Supplement of London, although the anachronistic vestiges remain in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Review. The problem, Bowman says, is that with almost 500 books appearing daily in the U.S. readers and booksellers depend on reviews to guide purchases, "Yet the opinions actually on offer in these magazines are every bit as quirky, perverse and prone to bias as they are in publications where the writers must take responsibility for what they say." That's exactly the point I made transparent in my review of the new edition of Plath's Ariel. It's part of the writerly code of ethics I've developed over the years that includes modeling, self-responsibility, attribution, and self-disclosure.

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