Anna Muenchrath

By reading paratexts and archival documents surrounding the global circulation of literature, this project traces the networks that constitute the world literary space, allowing us to see its contours as shaped by both the long-term accrual of past choices and material infrastructures, and by authors, translators, editors, and readers who do not simply replicate the values of the literary marketplace, but divert, question, and undermine them. The objects of the study include institutions like US world literature anthologies, the Council of Books in Wartime, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Oprah’s Book Club, and Amazon’s translation imprint.

Amazon Crossing, a publishing imprint of Amazon.com, is now the leading publisher of translations in the US. Grounded methodologically in literary sociology and critical algorithm studies, this project conducts a quantitative analysis of the corpus of translations published by Amazon Crossing compared to the corpus of translations produced by its four largest rivals. Focusing on the aspects of source language, genre, ratings and reviews, and gender, the aim of the project is to provide insights into how Amazon Crossing’s use of algorithmically processed data—data created by humans in concert with the logics of search and recommendation algorithms on Amazon.com—replaces human judgement, and how these machinic logics determine our access to global literary culture.