Readers are never merely passive recipients of textual messages. One of the most powerful insights of reader-response theory in the 1970s and 1980s is that the meaning of a text never resides entirely within the artifact itself. Commentators from Carlo Ginzberg ("aggressive originality"), to Jauss ("horizon of expectations"), to Fish ("interpretive communities"), and Radway ("Reading is not Eating") have long-since established that readers are creators of meaning. To quote Tony Bennett, meaning "is not a thing that texts can have, but is something that can only be produced, and always differently, within the reading formations that regulate the encounters between texts and readers." Yet even as it challenges the very idea that texts exist independently of readers and their institutional and social contexts, Bennett's concept of a "reading formation" also reminds us that there are socio-historically determined limits to creative appropriation. For Bennett, text, context, and reader constitute an inseparable unity; every reading situation is shaped by "discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading. . . ." A rich and nuanced account of the complex balance between social determination and autonomy therefore requires a combination of methods, both a consideration of textual features and investigation of book-historical, ideological, institutional, and social pressures.
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
Using English and Spanish translations of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung ‘The metamorphosis’ as a case study, this article contributes to current discussions of retranslation, and of cross-linguistic approaches to retranslation in particular. Building on the work of such scholars as Matthew Reynolds and Tom Cheesman, the analysis uses computational methods to evaluate variance among translators across a range of English and Spanish translations. The aim is twofold: first, to evaluate whether we can link translator variation to specific linguistic and rhetorical features in the original; and second, to determine whether those features are stable across languages.
The TRANSCOMP Dataset of Literary Translations is a collection of document-level word frequencies sampled from 10,631 translations into English of global literary fiction published since 1950, together with a historically matched parallel corpus of 10,682 fictional works originally published in English. We provide CSV files with word frequency counts for 10,000-word samples taken from each text. The associated metadata is available in a separate CSV. These data will be useful to literary scholars and linguists working in translation studies, and those interested in the linguistic, stylistic, and thematic specificity of translations from particular regions.
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