Conceived against the backdrop of ongoing debates regarding the status of national literary traditions in world literature, this essay offers a computational analysis of how national attention is distributed in contemporary fiction across multiple national contexts. Building on the work of Pascale Casanova, we ask how different national literatures engage with national themes and whether this engagement can be linked to one's position within a global cultural hierarchy. Our data consists of digital editions of 200 works of prize-winning fiction, divided into four subcorpora of equal size: U.S.-American, French, German, and a collection of novels drawn from 19 different "minor" European languages.
Preparatory reading (brand new article!): https://txtlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/erlin_et_al_cultural_capitals.pdf
Thur, 11.02.2021 18:15 - 19:45 (CET).
Matt Erlin is professor of German and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is a founding member of the Humanities Digital Workshop. He is the co-editor of the collection Distant Readings: Topographies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (2014) as well as the author of several articles on digital humanities and computational literary analysis.
Andrew Piper is Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the director of .txtLAB, a laboratory for cultural analytics and editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. He is the author most recently of Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge, 2020).
