Cultural Capitals: Modeling Minor European Literature

Stephen Pentecost,Matt Erlin,Cienna Townson,Andrew Piper,Douglas Knox,Brian Powell,Michaela Drouillard

doi:10.22148/001c.21182

Abstract

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. We ultimately find no evidence to support Casanova’s theory that minor literatures are more nationalistic than literature produced within major cultural capitals. Indeed, the evidence points to the exact opposite effect: all three of the models we employ suggest that novels written in more minor languages tend to be significantly less nationalistically focused than those written in European centres like France or Germany. Nevertheless our data do confirm Casanova’s larger hypothesis of the existence of visible stylistic effects associated with a book’s location within a global cultural hierarchy of languages.

Highlights

Among the key insights of Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters is a recognition that world literature can be construed as a complex adaptive system.[1]
We see consistent evidence to suggest that so-called minor literatures exhibit significantly different behaviour when it comes to preoccupation with national self-reference
Whether our proxy is national mentions (e.g., France/French), mentions of in-country locations, historical actors and events, or our broader overall nationalism quotient, each measure indicates a lower degree of preoccupation with national self-reference by authors writing in less common European languages

Summary

Introduction

Among the key insights of Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters is a recognition that world literature can be construed as a complex adaptive system.[1]. 1953), the Croatian Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981), and the Polish writer who lived most of his life in exile, Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) As this list should indicate, while Casanova's claims are CULTURAL CAPITALS: MODELING ‘MINOR’ EUROPEAN LITERATURE often phrased in transhistorical and transspatial terms, ("the" world republic of letters), her evidence is largely concerned with writers from a particular time (the early- to mid-twentieth century) and place (Europe). Her selection of writers is only ever drawn from those whose work fits her thesis. Throughout Casanova's extensive monograph no negative examples are provided of writers at the heart of Europe's literary culture who chose to write national tales or those at the margins who wrote on more universal themes

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Conclusion