What is it about?
The chapter uses Internet data-mining to test the hypothesis that Aleksis Kivi's great 1870 Finnish novel Seitsemän veljestä (translated into English as Seven Brothers [1929, 1991] and The Brothers Seven [2017]), while it has been translated 59 times into 34 different languages, has NOT entered World Literature (though I believe it should have).
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Why is it important?
Claims about World LIterature are notoriously nebulous: I think Kivi's novel SHOULD BE World Literature, so it is. This chapter is my first major adoption of Digital Humanities techniques to gain, through data-mining, some numerical figures that may give our decision-making some points of reference: how many Wikipedia languages; how many times have translations been adapted by artists who cannot read the text in the original; how many critical works have been published by scholars who do not originate from the original text's source culture, etc.
Perspectives
For me this experiment in quantitative empirical research was mostly motivated by Franco Moretti's "distant reading"--and specifically a feeling that Moretti's project was basically untenable, because he is making judgments about plots, narrative structures, genres, etc., based on secondary criticism. A quantitative approach to the magnitude of reader response seemed a much more plausible undertaking.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Metrics of World Literature, January 2017, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004340268_003.
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