Epilogue: Three Computational Frameworks for the Study of World Authorship

“World authorship” identifies a provocative new terrain of study, one that, as our contributors have shown, exceeds the existing and all too rigid boundaries of national frameworks within our field. At the same time, it also returns to, and aims to take seriously, a category that has experienced a great deal of critical disdain but that remains stubbornly central to our objects of study: namely that of the “author.” Despite our best critical intentions, authorship and the “author function” seem to have grown in significance within the increasingly transnational literary markets of today, rather than the other way around. Understanding these categories, and the social and cultural roles they play, remains an urgent and important undertaking. The point I wish to make here in this conclusion is that if we are going to prioritize these two categories (world and authorship) within the discipline of literary study and German studies more particularly, then at least part of our approach will have to be computational. We need a method to match both the scale and the nature of our claims. It’s with this in mind that I offer three ways of thinking about the study of authorship in a transnational context.

The work of Michel Foucault still strikes me as one of the most effective frameworks through which to imagine computational approaches to thinking about world authorship (“What Is an Author?”). For Foucault, an “author” was first and foremost a juridical concept, a punishable object. It was in this sense a category largely constituted by what today we would call metadata: the number of copies, books, translations, and reprints that an author produced and that could be attached to a proper name for legal purposes of both accounting and being accountable.

Tracking how an author’s work circulates within multiple national contexts through the practice of translation provides an opportune way through which to understand such a model of authorship. Translation studies has long been a vibrant, though often less well-recognized, sub-field of literary criticism, pushing against more nativist biases that are oriented around original-language texts. Translation shows us the ways in which cultures intersect, the modes of import and export, and the orientations that cultures have towards different parts of the world and different slices of the historical record. New data resources, such as the UNESCO Translation Index, offer a potentially rich resource for mapping the international circulations of authors. They can allow us to see the centrality of translation to the world literary market and chart the reach of different authors through translation at different points in time, as well as study questions of cultural origin or orientation.

Figure 1 offers a graph of the most translated authors since 1980 in all 152 countries monitored by UNESCO, plotted according to the mean of the author’s birth and death dates. Such a graph allows us to see some salient details about the recent past of world translation. First, it shows us the relative bias towards post-eighteenth-century writing. Almost all of the most translated authors over the last three decades were active in the nineteenth century or later (with the exception of Shakespeare, Plato, Perreault, and Rajanisa, who are not shown). It suggests the extent to which the years 1800 to the present can be thought of as a unique period within cultural history, one that both marks a division with the eighteenth century and that which came before and is also relatively coherent unto itself (the graph suggests no rising prominence of authors’ translations by birth date after 1800). Such evidence can give us new ways of thinking about oft-debated questions of periodization in our field and the ability to identify cultural coherence across large timescales.

Second, when looking at this graph we see how children’s literature (as well as detective fiction) represents a very strong component of world translation (the Grimms, Hans Christian Anderson, Enid Blyton, Astrid Lindgren, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Roald Dahl all make the list). It should give us pause to ask why these two genres have become so central to world...