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 United States. 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 those produced by the next four largest translation publishers. By focusing on patterns and outliers across variables like source language, genre, ratings, reviews, and gender, the project elicits insights into how Amazon Crossing’s use of algorithmically processed data—data created by humans in concert with the logic of search and recommendation algorithms on Amazon.com—shapes cultural production. Ultimately, the aim of this project is not only to provide insights into Amazon Crossing or even the translation market in the United States, but into how algorithms replace human judgment, as well as, crucially, what role humanities’ methods have to play in this investigation.