The Truth of Disgust. Moral and (Un)Social Emotions on Goodreads

In our contemporary mediascape online book talks are constantly growing. In this digital literary sphere, people can create online communities and can share their opinions about books they read. Nowadays everyone is a critic. This can offer new opportunities for researchers to observe some patterns of interpretation of ‘common readers’ in a phenomenological way (Felski). Previous studies have shown that emotions are a prominent feature of Goodreads and Amazon reviews (e.g. Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo; Milota).Taking this as a starting point, I examine the role of emotions in Goodreads and Amazon’s reviews of the novel Le ripetizioni , written by the Italian author Giulio Mozzi. Disgust is a prominent emotion in the online reception of this work. Using a metahermeneutic method (Korthals Altes), I show how this is linked to moral issues. Following Mario Barenghi’s reflection, I claim that disgust occurs because readers cannot experience negative empathy (Ercolino) and are unable to comprehend disgust within an overall interpretive framework. I suggest that sociability on Goodreads can often be described as a form of “unsociable sociability".