Critical genres Generic changes of literary criticism in computer-mediated communication Sebastian Domsch Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München he genre of literary criticism has always strained under the antagonism of an inherently dialogical structure piercing its generic boundaries, and a strong monologizing tendency to gain more or less absolute critical authority. he generic markers of criticism create a distance both to their object and their addressee that tries to make answers/comments impossible. his is about to change drastically in the near future, as critical genres are migrating to the internet, and are now arguably evolving into new genres by processes of delimitation and iterative re-dialogisation. his article takes a close look at the generic changes that critical discourse experiences while being transformed by the possibilities of computer-mediated communication. 1. Introduction If one thinks of a literary reviewer as someone trying to inluence her readers to either buy or not buy a certain book (and maybe even to read it), there are reasons to assume that the most inluential critic and reviewer of these days could be Harriet Klausner. She does not write for the books section of the New York Times, nor for the Times Literary Supplement or any other of the highest-ranking journals and newspapers for literary criticism. In fact, she does not write for any newspa- per at all. She used to be an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania and wrote a monthly review column of recommended reads. But at the moment of writing, she is the Top Reviewer at the online shop Amazon. She is writing and publishing her reviews on any product she is interested in, at any time she wants, currently amounting to more than twenty thousand individual reviews, and she is trusting in the community of her readers – fellow consumers all in the world of Amazon – to secure her place as the most highly valued critic of this online world. She is a leading critic for tens of thousands of interested readers, but she will most likely never be acknowledged as such, for she is writing in a completely new genre, one