On Writing A Comparative Literary History: Delocalizing Minor Literatures in European Languages in The Age of Big Data'

Arcadia 2018; 53(2): 278–307
César Domínguez*, Giovanna Di Rosario, and Matteo Ciastellardi

On Writing a Comparative Literary History:
Delocalizing Minor Literatures in European
Languages in the Age of ‘Big Data’
https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2018-0028
Abstract: “Minor literature” is an elusive concept in literary scholarship. Its wide-

spread use stands in sharp contrast to the paucity of its theoretical development,
which is limited to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1975 seminal book Kafka.
Pour une littérature mineure. We claim that a comparative history of minor
literatures in European languages – a nonexistent project so far – requires three
preliminary steps, namely, conceptual clarification, cross-pollination between
comparative literary history and the digital humanities, and a bibliometric analy-
sis of the minor-literature constellation. First, conceptual clarification is needed to
show, on the one hand, how Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments on minor litera-
tures significantly differ from those of what they posit as their source (Kafka’s
discussion on kleine Literaturen) and, on the other hand, the existence of alter-
native genealogies. Second, by adhering to a Braudelian definition of compara-
tive history, the massive data needed for addressing the production and reception
of (minor) literatures in specific social and cultural contexts would immensely
benefit from recourse to digital tools. Third, and as an example of approaching
conceptual clarification with digital tools, a quantitative study of the minor-
literature constellation must be performed using a key tool of international scho-
larship (the MLA International Bibliography). In the current paper, we may only
provide an introductory survey of these three fields and, therefore, the results are
tentative and further research is needed.
Keywords: bibliometrics, big data, comparative literary history, digital huma-

nities, minor literature
*Corresponding author: César Domínguez, University of Santiago de Compostela, Faculty of

Philology, Burgo das Nacións s/nº, 15782 Santiago de Compostela (A Coruña), Spain,
email: cesar.dominguez@usc.es
Giovanna Di Rosario, Politecnico di Milano, Department of Design, Building B7, Via Durando 38/
A, 20158 Milano, Italy, email: giovanna.dirosario@polimi.it
Matteo Ciastellardi, Politecnico di Milano, Department of Design, Building B7, Via Durando 38/
A, 20158 Milano, Italy, email: matteo.ciastellardi@polimi.it
Authenticated | cesar.dominguez@usc.es author's copy

Download Date | 11/9/18 11:50 AM
On Writing a Comparative Literary History 279
Consider the case of a doctoral student in a comparative literature program who is

working on the preliminary stages of her dissertation proposal: she wants to
investigate minor literatures, a concept that caught her attention when mentioned
in passing in an MA seminar.1 To get an idea of the field, the student most
probably would turn first to the MLA International Bibliography (hereafter
MLAIB), for it is a database of scholarly books and articles on modern languages,
literatures, folklore, and linguistics which has been compiled since 1926 with
documents dating back as far as 1881. It contains more than two million records,
with updates taking place 9 times per year, and at least 60 languages other than
English (including minor languages2) are represented. In short, the MLAIB is the
source for experienced researchers (Manuel 94).
If the doctoral student had conducted a search of the MLAIB in February,
2018, the general literary topic heading (hereafter GSU) “minor literature” would
have yielded 124 citations between 1961 and 2017 in 9 languages (81 in English, 23
in French, 9 in Spanish, 5 in German, and one each in Chinese, Czech, Galician,
Japanese, and Polish), including 73 journal articles, 33 book articles, 13 disserta-
tion abstracts, 4 books, and 1 book collection. Confronted with these 124 re-
sources, the doctoral student would have next decided to narrow the search to the
monographs. Most probably, she would have started with the dissertations to test
the relevance of her topic choice. The 13 abstracts show that the concept of minor
literatures has been applied to geocultural contexts as diverse as Algeria, Argen-
tina, Brazil, Canada, England, Ireland, Japan, Martinique, and the (southern)
United States, with only one theory-oriented study related to Gilles Deleuze
(Zamberlin). Of the four books, one expands beyond the abovementioned geocul-
tural scope to include Italian literature by Somali writers. Furthermore, the
relevance of the reference to Gilles Deleuze is supported by a search narrowed to
“GSU(‘minor literature’)” and the subject-author heading “Gilles Deleuze,” which
yields 41 citations, including a 1985 translation into English of Chapter Four of
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book entitled Kafka. Pour une littérature mine-
ure (Deleuze and Guattari, “Kafka”).
Before delving into Deleuze and Guattari’s book, the doctoral student might
decide that her second step should be to consult reference books such as literary
1 We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their many insightful comments and
suggestions, which helped us to improve the manuscript. Other suggestions, however, would take
this paper too far afield.
2 “A minor language is impoverished in terms of its numeric weight, spatial distribution, and
functional power. On these three grounds many minor languages become endangered languages”
(Bathia and Ritchie 802).

280 César Domínguez, Giovanna Di Rosario, and Matteo Ciastellardi
dictionaries and encyclopedias. She would find, to her astonishment, that no

reference book includes an entry for “minor literature” except for, on the one
hand, collateral mentions (Baßler within the entry “Kurzprosa”; Cuddon within
the entry “rhizome”), and, on the other hand, reference books on Deleuze himself
(Bogue, “Minoritarian”; Deleuze 91–114; “The Minor”; Colebrook 103–23; Marks).
From all these data, the doctoral student would conclude, first, that she had
found an interesting dissertation topic which requires some conceptual clarifica-
tion to address the variegated geography dealt with by critics, and, second, that
her main theoretical reference should be Deleuze and Guattari’s book, since their
parenthood of the concept of minor literature seems indisputable so far.3 However,
this would be unfortunately misleading for two reasons. First, the issue at stake is
not simply formulating a more precise and unambiguous concept, but recon-
structing a conceptual constellation with complex geopolitical and disciplinary
genealogies. Second, while Deleuze and Guattari have certainly provided a defini-
tion of minor literature upon which much scholarly work has been based, this
definition is characteristically distinct from Kafka’s original term kleine Literatur,
which these two authors purport to interpret.
The aim of this paper is threefold. First, the conceptual problems that
surround the concept of minor literature, both before and after Deleuze and
Guattari, will be discussed. Second, we will provide a survey of the relationships
between the digital humanities and comparative literature, for the ultimate goal
of our discussion is to reflect on the possibility of a comparative history of minor
literatures in European languages, for which the digital humanities may provide
new insights. Third, we will apply a bibliometric analysis to what the MLAIB
registers as studies on minor literatures. We will move from a first data filtering
across the concept of minor literature using the MLAIB to review its growth and
decline over time, its distribution and diffusion according to languages, its
3 The doctoral student may notice that there has been an exponential increase in the usage trend
of minor literature since the early 1990 s in coincidence with the translation into English of Deleuze

and Guattari’s book, either partially (Deleuze and Guattari, “Kafka”) or book-length (Deleuze and
Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature). As a result of the foundational role of Deleuze and
Guattari’s book, which, in turn, transformed Kafka into – as so eloquently put by Marie-Odile
Thirouin – “Schutzpatron der minoritören Literaturen,” we also focus on Kafka’s coinage and
discussion here. However, the discussion on minor literatures has a long previous tradition that
may be traced back to, at least, Johann Gottfried Herder’s 1772 Abhandlung über den Ursprung der
Sprache and 1784–1791 Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. We cannot address
this tradition here due to the constraints of space (cf. Biti 118–32 concerning the Herderian
precedent).

sources and subjects, and the dimension of its authors (in terms of participation
and co-authorship).4
It is our contention that a bibliometric analysis of minor literatures may
provide a more exact picture of how this topic is dealt with by mainstream
scholarship and challenge one of its main claims: that stasis (with the cognate
values of localism and provincialism) is the key feature of minor literatures, either
in linguistic terms (when defined as literatures written in languages of lesser
diffusion), political terms (when defined as revolutionary), or in ethnic terms
(when defined as minority-group writing).
1 Minor Literature: (Mis)Fortunes of a Concept

In Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Ministarstvo boli, the main character and alter ego of
Ugrešić – Tanja Lucić, a Croatian exile who teaches former Yugoslav literatures at
the University of Amsterdam – is confronted by one of her students, Igor, in the
following terms: “A? Mala književnost ne zaslužuje veliku oporbenu gestu... Don’t
you worry... Nema razloga za strah. Zapravo mi vas je žao. Učiteljica ste malih
književnosti, a i one su vam se u posljednje vrijeme nešto stisle.” (Ministarstvo
251) The English translation by Michael Henry Heim reads as follows: “A minor
literature like ours doesn’t rate an opposition party. No, no, don’t worry. I’m just
sorry for you. You’re a teacher of minor literatures, small literatures, and even
they have shrunken as of late.” (Ministry 208) And the Spanish-Castilian transla-
tion by Luisa Fernanda Garrido Ramos and Tihomir Pištelek, in turn, reads as
follows: “¿Eh? la literatura menor no merece un gran gesto de resistencia... Don’t
you worry... No hay motivo para tener miedo. En realidad, me da pena. Es maestra
de literaturas menores, que en los últimos tiempos han encogido aún más.”
(Ministerio 235)
Notice how the Croatian phrase mala književnost has been identically ren-
dered in English and Spanish-Castilian as minor literature/literatura menor,
though somehow hesitantly in the case of the English translator as proved by the
translation expansion “small literatures” next to “a teacher of minor literatures.”
And yet mala književnost means literally ‘small literature.’ So, where does minor/
menor come from? As Heim was a Professor of Slavic Languages at UCLA, Garrido
Ramos holds a BA in Yugoslav Literature from the University of Zagreb, and
4 The rationale for including the concepts kleine Literatur and minority literature besides minor
literature will become evident later in Section 1.

Pištelek holds a BA in German Studies also from the University of Zagreb, is it

possible that they use Deleuze and Guattari’s scholarly lexicon for translation
(littérature mineure), whereby mala (small) has been retroactively replaced by
manja (minor)? In fact, Deleuze and Guattari, in their Kafka. Pour une littérature
mineure, translated Kafka’s kleine Literatur as “minor literature,” rather than
“small literature,” which is the literal translation of Kafka’s concept. The influ-
ence of their book has been so overwhelming, as mentioned in the introduction,
that it has not only replaced Kafka’s original concept, but also his discussion of
kleine Literaturen, even though they advance ideas that are the exact opposite of
those conveyed by Kafka.5
The example of the way Ugrešić’s concept has been translated shows that
“small literature” and “minor literature” are considered to be synonymous and, at
the same time, not quite so, as Heim’s translation pair (minor/small) indicates.
This points to the need for clarifying the conceptual ambiguities that surround the
scholarly coinage of littérature mineure. First, we will contrast Kafka’s discussion
on small literatures with Deleuze and Guattari’s excrescences on minor litera-
tures. Second, we will further the discussion by examining Milan Kundera’s and
Ugrešić’s contributions to the debate. While Kundera’s approach keeps within the
limits of the conventional East-Central European relation between small nations
and small literatures, Ugrešić adds to this an ironic stance that engages with the
shrinking of literatures during post-Yugoslav times.6
When dealing with small/minor literatures and the foundational role played
by Kafka, an important issue that should not be overlooked is how differently
Kafka in general and his Tagebücher in particular, which contain his most inter-
esting thoughts on small literatures, have been introduced into different linguistic
traditions. For the English-speaking world, Kafka’s Journal is still to this day the
Schocken Kafka, an artificial composite as elaborated by Max Brod and translated
into English by Joseph Kresh (Volume 1) and Martin Greenberg with the coopera-
5 For the foundational role of Deleuze and Guattari’s book, Jadranka Cergol’s statement is
illustrative: “The researchers who first defined the theoretical and methodological basis of
minority literature were Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their monographic work on Kafka.”
(62) A long tradition previous to Deleuze and Guattari is being overlooked here, as mentioned
above.
6 César Domínguez has presented most of what follows here in Section 1 in the seminar “Ultra-
minor Literatures” (ACLA, Harvard University, 17–20 March 2016) in a paper titled “Kleine, Mineur,
Small. On the (Mis)Fortunes of a Concept.” Veronika Tuckerová also presented in the abovemen-
tioned seminar, and her paper resulted in the publication “The Archaeology of Minor Literature.”
Both authors share the same views regarding the coinage by Kafka and the (mis)reading by Deleuze
and Guattari.

tion of Hannah Arendt (Volume 2) in 1948–1949. In Spanish-Castilian, in contrast,

Kafka’s Journal follows the 1990 German critical edition by Hans-Gerd Koch,
Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley and, hence, a version that closely follows
Kafka’s Tagebücher notebooks.
This is a very important caveat when discussing Kafka’s ideas on small
literatures, for, unlike the English translation, in which a partial version is
provided in a single entry, the one for 25 December 1911, in the German original
the main discussion on small literatures is split between the entries for 25 and
27 December 1911.7 Furthermore, each linguistic tradition has canonized a distinc-
tive Kafka and, in the case of the passages on kleine Literaturen, a distinctive
translation choice and, hence, a distinctive critical understanding. In the French-
speaking world, the reader will be dealing with Marthe Robert’s translation
(based on Brod’s 1951 edition), which is a kind of classic of French literature, for it
forms part of the Pléiade œuvres complètes. And, more specifically in relation to
small literatures, for the French audience Kafka wrote in a single entry (25 Decem-
ber 1911) of littératures mineures (and not of *littératures petites), a concept used
to introduce the outline of what looks like a future object of research for Kafka:
“Schéma pour établir les caractéristiques des littératures mineures” (Kafka, Jour-
nal 183).
Similarly to Robert’s French translation replacing Kafka’s original, Deleuze
and Guattari’s study of Kafka’s reflection on kleine Literaturen, which is based in
turn on Robert’s translation, came to replace Kafka’s actual reflection and conse-
crated a terminological equivalence between kleine Literaturen and littératures
mineures. In fact, for many scholars, Kafka’s definition of kleine Literaturen,
which he did not provide, is Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, which reads as
follows: “Une littérature mineure n’est pas celle d’une langue mineure, plutôt
celle qu’une minorité fait dans une langue majeure.” (Kafka 29) In the English-
speaking world, the kleine Literaturen and minor literatures are considered
equivalent thanks to Dana Polan’s book-length translation of Deleuze and Guat-
tari.
In addition to the terminological equivalence and the transfer of Deleuze and
Guattari’s definition of littérature mineure to Kafka’s nonexistent definition of
kleine Literatur, many scholars have also accepted Deleuze and Guattari’s three
characteristics – “deterritorialisation,” “politisation,” and “collective value” – as
7 Ronald Bogue overlooks this critical issue when claiming that “Deleuze and Guattari find
inspiration for their theory of minor literature in an extended diary entry of Kafka’s, dated
December 25, 1911.” (Deleuze 92)

coterminous with Kafka’s three characteristics as listed in his scheme – Lebhaftig-

keit (liveliness), Entlastung (less constraint), and Popularität (popularity). While
some similarities in the second and third characteristics may be possible, the
distinctive locations of Kafka’s kleine Literaturen and Deleuze and Guattari’s
littératures mineures make these similarities exclusively nominal and, conse-
quently, arbitrary.8 For Kafka, key examples of small literatures are “contempor-
ary Jewish literature in Warsaw” and “contemporary Czech literature” (Kafka, The
Diaries 191), the former expressed in Yiddish and the latter in Czech, literatures
which obviously do not qualify as constructed by a minority “within a major
language” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 16).
Deleuze and Guattari’s erasure of Kafka’s kleine and identification of littéra-
tures mineures with the ‘revolutionary’ work of a minority within a major lan-
guage involves several other conceptual manipulations by these authors. Pascale
Casanova has gathered these manipulations under the label of a “double ana-
chronism,” the anachronism of considering Kafka as “prophet and seer, capable
of divining and announcing events to come” on the one hand and, on the other,
the anachronism of “identifying politics with revolution” (204).9 We cannot delve
here into all of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual manipulations.10 Suffice to say
8 Kafka claims that in small literatures “literary events” are acknowledged as “objects of political
solicitude” (The Diaries 192), which may be read in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s politization,
whereas Kafka’s second feature – the lack of “outstanding talents” (192) – may be read in relation
to Deleuze and Guattari’s reasons for the collective values of minor literatures.
9 Casanova’s discussion of minor literatures is a telling example of what can be termed “hyper-
localisation,” the stasis of minor literatures: “The political dependence of emerging literary spaces
is signalled by the recourse to a functionalist aesthetic and, taking the criteria of literary
modernity as a standard of measurement, the most conservative narrative, novelistic, and poetical
forms.” (Casanova 199)
10 Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari’s argument on minor literatures as deployed in Kafka
anticipates the important chapters on literature in their 1980 Mille Plateaux (especially the plateau
“November 20, 1923”), as well as in Deleuze’s 1979 “Un manifeste de moins,” and his 1993 Critique
et Clinique (ch. 1). Due to the constraints of space, we cannot delve into these connections here. It
suffices to say that the basics remain unchanged. There are neither major nor minor languages,
“but two possible treatments of the same language” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
103). Hence minor languages are not “simply sublanguages, idiolects and dialects, but potential
agents of the major language’s entering into a becoming-minoritarian of all of its dimensions and
elements” (106). The task of literature is precisely to open up “a kind of foreign language within
language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other of
language, a minorisation of this major language” (Deleuze, Critique 5). Our argument that Deleuze
and Guattari, whose interpretation is indebted to the much-questioned “triple ghetto” theory of
Prague German literature (cf. Tuckerová 441–446), disregard literature in Yiddish produced in
Warsaw and literature in Czech still holds. Chana Kronfeld argues that “Deleuze and Guattari’s
narrative [...] denies not only the links between his [Kafka’s] work and the textual practices of

that, unlike their geography of littératures mineures, which closely coincides with
the postcolonial world, Kafka’s could be also a developmental rather than exclu-
sively a geographical concept, meaning that his notion of kleine Literatur repre-
sents a literary stage as well – the emergence of a literature (cf. Domínguez).11
Due to some of the characteristics Kafka attributes to kleine Literaturen and to
the fact that Czech literature is one of the examples he provides, such a literary
stage has been conventionally introduced within the telos of nationalization.
Casanova, for instance, claims that “Politisation in national or nationalist form
[...] is one of the constitutive features of small literatures” (189). Such a telos is
also supported by Kundera in his 1993 essay “The Unloved Child of the Family,”
in which, following Kafka’s steps – though using musicians instead of writers –
describes the heavy load small nations impose upon their artists. It is the load of
the undivided loyalty to the tribe, which results in a hyper-representation of the
small nation and the exclusion of those artists who do not comply with this
requirement. Unlike Kafka, who focuses on the process and, therefore, in the
kleine Literatur as a stage that may be outgrown, Kundera’s view is pessimistic,
tragic, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the small nations’ impositions go beyond
verbal languages and affect also a “supranational language” (187) such as music,
and, on the other hand, they describe “a destiny” (190) in which cosmopolitan
writers, when not annihilated as an “unloved son,” are humiliated with “maternal
indulgence” (194).
A further step in the reflection on the national dimension of small/minor
literatures is taken by Ugrešić in her 2000 essay “A Short Contribution to the
History of a National Literature.” In the quote from Ugrešić’s The Ministry of Pain
which was included at the beginning of Section 1, Igor reminded Tanja of a key
issue that is usually overlooked by a professor of (post)Yugoslav literatures – that
of their being small. In Ugrešić’s essay, such a further step may be termed as
renationalization, for she describes the emergence of Croatian literature out of
Hebrew and Yiddish literature but also “the very possibility of producing such oppositional
literatures in the non-major languages.”
11 It is unquestionable that Deleuze and Guattari’s construction of the category of “minor
literature” is, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle put it, a “creative misprision, a strong reading that ‘forces’
the text” (59), and yet an interpretation from which a valid theory of literature has evolved. The
issue at stake, however, is to decide whether the concepts and theses enforced in Kafka’s texts are
acceptable or not. Claiming, for example, that “Kafka’s situation is analogous to that of Indian
writers who must choose between their regional, Indian tongues and a pan-Indian, bureaucratic
English” (Bogue, “Minor Writing” 105) as a result of the postcolonial geography implied by
Deleuze and Guattari (a creative work from within imperial languages) is undoubtedly a false
analogy based on a lack of knowledge of Kafka’s languages (cf. Nekula).

Yugoslav literatures in post-Yugoslav times. Ugrešić’s stance is deeply ironic.

Being an exile from Franjo Tuđman’s Croatia and excluded from the new canon of
Croatian literature, Ugrešić’s approach to Croatian literature as small literature is
clearly indebted to Kundera’s pessimistic description, and not to Deleuze and
Guattari’s revolutionary overtones. Small literatures’ contributions are not inter-
nationally acknowledged due to their “inaccessible languages,” says Kundera
(191), a seclusion which in the case of post-Yugoslav literatures is secured thanks
to the assertion of distinctive languages by what Ugrešić calls the “Committees for
the Defense of National Substance” (“Short Contribution” 116). Furthermore, as a
result of the “vertical axis” (121) of renationalized small literatures, on the one
hand, writers are requested to be the “moral conscience of their nation” (121),
and, on the other, when such tribal loyalty is proven, no matter what the intrinsic
quality of their works, they are considered “a moral rock,” “a giant in spirit,” “a
Croatian titan,” so no “national” writer in Croatia “has a problem with low self-
confidence” (120).
Despite the overwhelming influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration of
littératures mineures, a reading of Kafka’s original reflections on kleine Literaturen
shows that both concepts are not only distinct,12 but at odds with one another due
to their different nature – in Kafka’s case, the concept is developmental qua
literary stage, in Deleuze and Guattari’s case, the concept is connected to revolu-
tionary aims in relation to the invention of a “people to come” (le peuple à venir),13
which has been restrictively identified with the geography of the postcolonial
12 Galin Tihanov further asserts this distinctiveness in an essay (provocatively?) entitled “Do
‘Minor Literatures’ Still Exist?” Tihanov distinguishes between minoritäre Literatur – “the writing
of a minority within a dominant majority” along the lines of Deleuze and Guattari – and kleine
Literatur – “an evaluative notion that sees ‘minor literatures’ as small [...], derivative, deprived of
originality when measured by the yardstick of ‘mainstream literatures’” (169–170) within a
tradition that may be traced back to Herder, as mentioned above. Furthermore, Tihanov argues
that “the axiological discrimination between ‘small’ and ‘great,’ ‘minor’ and ‘major’ literatures
becomes increasingly untenable” (186) and therefore “the very concept of ‘minor literatures’ is an
historical construct with a specific (limited) life-span” (169). Despite the initial distinction
between minoritäre Literatur and kleine Literatur, both concepts become conflated again, though
we assume Tihanov predicates the untenability exclusively for kleine Literatur: “the distinction
between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ literatures was the outcome of an era of thriving national traditions
and strong nation states” (187). Besides the fact that in Tihanov’s argumentation, the category of
minoritäre Literatur is still tenable, we further claim that the category of kleine Literatur is also still
tenable, for it is not a matter of structural-functional properties, as contended by the Herderian
tradition, but a matter of power relations.
13 “Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is
certainly not by using a minor language as a dialect, by regionalising or ghettoising, that one
becomes revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugat-

world. Kundera’s and Ugrešić’s contributions to the debate, in turn, are closer to
Kafka’s coinage and arguments rather than to Deleuze and Guattari’s. Further-
more, both Kundera and Ugrešić see close links between small literatures and the
national telos.14 And yet, such an interpretation only seems to be valid for some of
the characteristics listed by Kafka and his example of Czech literature. But, what
about “contemporary Jewish literature [meaning, literature in Yiddish] in War-
saw”? Is Yiddish literature an example of an emerging national literature on an
equal footing with Czech literature? Or, on the contrary, is Kafka’s aim to indicate
that both are exemplary kleine Literaturen, but for different reasons? To answer
this question goes beyond the scope of this essay.
2 Digital Humanities and Comparative Literature

The solidification of “the Digital Humanities” (hereafter DH) as a term referring to
an academic field took place in 2004 with a collection of essays published as a
Companion by Blackwell (Jones 4). Paradoxically, this collection does not provide
a concise definition of the field. For the purposes of this essay it may be relevant
to turn to a definition of DH included in another Blackwell Companion, this time
devoted to comparative literature (hereafter CL). “Digital Humanities is an um-
brella term for a wide array of interdisciplinary practices for creating, applying,
interpreting, interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technolo-
gies,” Todd Presner contends (195–196).
In our search for the cross-pollination of CL and DH, the solidification date of
the latter (2004) pushes us to look for interactions in the last decennial report of
the American Comparative Literature Association (hereafter ACLA), inasmuch as
no DH textbook seems to be interested in CL (the previous report, called the
“Saussy Report,” was published in 2004). The 2017 ACLA Report (Heise et al.)
includes a section titled “Media” in which four essays (Pressman; Tenen; Abel;
Heise) out of the seven address DH issues. Of them, Ursula K. Heise’s interview
with Franco Moretti stands out, for his work not only represents the most ground-
breaking one in DH as applied to literary studies during the last 10 years, but
Moretti also anticipates what he sees as future possibilities for CL in the encounter
ing them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming.” (Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus 106)
14 This is what we call the minor-literature constellation, meaning a group of interrelated
concepts, including minor literature, small literature (kleine Literatur), and minority literature,
which will be the object of a bibliometric analysis in Section 3.

with DH. In terms of the encounters between both fields during the last 10 years,
Moretti greatly regrets that computational criticism has focused almost exclu-
sively on English corpora (Moretti in Heise, “Comparative Literature” 273).
Furthermore, he adds that he was convinced that DH “would, indeed, change our
historical knowledge,” but “the gathering [of historical results] has been very
poor so far, very slim” (273). His “naïve hope” was that DH “would bring into the
history of literature a change comparable to that of the Annales. That hasn’t
happened” (275, 276). As for the future possibilities, Moretti singles out four: 1)
neurosciences becoming an “invaluable ally of studies of reading”; 2) macrore-
gional studies, which have “nothing to do, of course, with area studies”; 3)
nonliterary archives as “a really important test case for what we can contribute in
terms of the analysis of cultures”; and 4) “rethinking the meaning of the past”
(277, 281, 282, 283).
Of Moretti’s diagnosis, three issues are especially relevant for our purposes,
namely, the overcoming of Anglo-monolingualism, macroregional studies, and
rethinking the meaning of the past. It is necessary to take into consideration now
a more full-fleshed map of DH’s recent history and future under the light of an
unavoidable fact – it still will take some time to have scholars in the humanities
in general and in CL in particular trained in DH (Wilkens 19). As for DH’s recent
history, Matthew Wilkens claims – in terms of the pollination of literary studies
(not exactly CL) by DH – that the use of computational methods has been
restricted to three areas: text mining, network analysis and literary sociology, and
clustering and mapping. And as for DH’s future, Presner envisions – in terms of
the pollination of DH by CL – three futures: comparative media studies, compara-
tive data studies, and comparative authorship and platform studies.
In terms of this cross-pollination map, the next question that deserves to be
addressed is: Where does the comparative dimension lie? A possible answer is that
the comparative dimension lies in the object of study, in the materiality. CL needs to
face that, in contrast to the overwhelming role played by the print, “the burgeoning
field of electronic literature” will necessitate a reconceptualization of the discipline
practices (Presner 195), for now the emerging object of study, electronic literature,
is “comparative literature. It operates across machine and human languages,
requiring translation of these languages before it even reaches the human reader”
(Pressman 248). A second possible answer is that the comparative dimension lies in
the corpora, either literary or nonliterary. As Moretti regrets, here Anglo-monolin-
gualism rules. And a third possible answer is that the comparative dimension lies
in the investigation to be carried out as based upon corpora/data.
Moretti’s published research between 1997 (Atlas of the European Novel
1800–1900) and 2013 (Distant Reading) provides outstanding examples of the
application of computational criticism to multilingual corpora aimed at compara-

tive analysis in two of Wilkens’s three areas – network analysis and literary
sociology and clustering and mapping. Multilingualism is inherent either to the
literary corpus (mainly novels in English and French in the Atlas, for example) or
the nonliterary corpus (distant reading of the rise of the novel in Britain, Japan,
Italy, Spain, and Nigeria in Graphs, Maps, Trees). This line – both multilingual
and comparative – has been continued within only one of the abovementioned
areas (network analysis and literary sociology) by Richard Jean So and Hoyt
Long’s research on modernist literary networks in the United States, Japan, and
China. Other examples provided by Wilkens for text mining, network analysis and
literary sociology and clustering and mapping are based exclusively on Anglo-
monolingual corpora.
At this stage we need to take a step back to ask: What is the place for Big Data
(hereafter BD) in this landscape? The first academic reference to BD dates back to
Francis X. Diebold’s 2000 presentation at the Eighth World Congress of the
Econometric Society in Seattle, in which the term names “the explosion in the
quantity (and sometimes, quality) of available and potentially relevant data,
[which is] largely the result of recent and unprecedented advancements in data
recording and storage technology” (115). Either a subfield of computer science,
statistics and x-metrics or a discipline in itself (as Diebold claims), what needs to
be stressed here is that the debate about the place this subfield/discipline should
have in DH research and, more specifically, in the encounter between CL and DH
is merely at its infancy.
In the latter case, we have only one descriptive approach by Jonathan E. Abel,
who, on the grounds of Masuda Yoneji’s The Information Society as Post-Industrial
Society (1981) and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1951), warns about “our contempor-
ary interest in big data” for “our fetish too often denies the importance of individual
or random possibilities in favor of tendencies” (268), a warning to add to the list of
caveats against Moretti’s distant reading. More helpful is Frédéric Kaplan’s repre-
sentation of BD research as a structured research field within DH. Kaplan presents
BD-DH research as three concentric circles: 1) research focusing on processing and
interpreting big and networked cultural data sets; 2) understanding the relation
between data processing and interpretation as occurring in “a larger context of the
new digital culture characterised by collective discourses, large community, ubi-
quitous software, and global IT actors”; and 3) the human experience through
physical interfaces, websites and installations of big cultural data.
To sum up, then, the encounter between DH and CL has mainly developed
within the areas of network analysis and literary sociology and clustering and
mapping according to mainstream literature, to which we add here research
carried out with BD, more specifically, scientometrics. Based on the seminal work
by Derek J. De Solla Price, scientometrics has been defined by David J. Hess as the

“quantitative study of science, communication in science, and science policy”

(75). We claim that scientometrics as applied to literary studies may contribute to
the development of what Presner envisions as one of the three futures of DH as
pollinated by CL-comparative data studies (hereafter CDS). CDS allows to “use the
computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely
by creating models, visualisations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are
simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties” (Presner
202).
Along the lines of Moretti’s recognition that his study of morphological
evolution has transformed into the analysis of quantitative data (Distant Reading
179), scientometrics represents not only another form of quantitative data analy-
sis, but one complementary to this morphological analysis (Ferrer, “Digital
Humanities” 4). It is an emerging research field as applied to the humanities
because it was considered until recently that scientometrics methods cannot be
used due to the differences in terms of citation with hard sciences (cf. Larivière et
al.).15
The landscape of cross-collaboration between DH and comparative literary
history – our focus here – is somehow lumped in with the cross-collaboration
with CL in general, but it has started to boom in the last five years. To our
knowledge, there are only three such cases – Marcel Cornis-Pope’s 2014 compara-
tive history and Matthew L. Jockers’s and Ted Underwood’s 2013 methodology
monographs.
Cornis-Pope’s comparative history materializes the comparative dimension in
terms of both the object of study and perspective (translingual, international,
European), and represents the first work to focus on DH within the series of “A
Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages.” In this work DH – a
concept that, tellingly, is not used – should be exclusively understood as the
materiality proper of electronic literature. The volume is organized around four
sections: 1) “Multimedia productions in theoretical and historical perspective”; 2)
“Regional and intercultural projects”; 3) “Forms and genres”; and 4) “Readers
and rewriters in multimedia environments.” The overarching aim of these four
sections is acknowledging that “if the humanities are to retain their fundamental
role in an increasingly interdisciplinary, media-driven world, they must [...] start
from the recognition that the traditional objects of advanced study in the huma-
15 This view has been seriously challenged in the last few years both in the humanities in general
(Linmans) and in literary studies in particular (cf. Ferrer, “Digital Humanities”; “El canon
literario”; and “Le Prix Nobel.”)

nities and the arts have changed significantly during the past forty to fifty years”
(Cornis-Pope, “General Introduction” 8).
Underwood (16) claims in his monograph on periodization that the introduc-
tion of quantitative methods in literary history “opens up new ways of character-
ising gradual change,” something that is not elaborated until his last book
chapter. By drawing on a collection of 4,275 English-language (!) volumes cover-
ing the period from 1700 to 1899, a study of broad changes in 18th- and 19th-
century diction is carried out, which reveals that “by the end of the nineteenth
century there’s a gulf between diction in different genres that had not previously
existed. Moreover, this appears to be a broad differentiation between literary and
non-literary diction.” (168) This kind of evidence challenges the traditional attri-
bution of a causal role to literary movements (in this case, Romanticism), which
rather participate in broader discursive trends. “Trends of this kind,” Underwood
adds, “play out on a scale that literary scholars aren’t accustomed to describing,
and it may take decades for us to figure out how to describe them.” (169)
Finally, Jockers’s monograph on the application of digital tools to literary
history is the broadest in scope, for in it he advocates the need of macroanalysis
(distant reading) and microanalysis (close reading) working in tandem in order to
inform our understanding of the literary record. The basic difference between
both approaches is that macroanalysis “reveals details about texts that are,
practically speaking, unavailable to close readers of the texts” (26). Macroanalysis
(including subareas such as author gender analysis, author nationality analysis,
collocate studies, computational authorship attribution, influence network, sty-
listic-thematic data matrix analysis, topic modeling, etc.) results in a contextuali-
zation on an unprecedented scale. Interestingly, Jockers links such contextualiza-
tion to the approaches taken by the Annales historians (19, 27), whose model
Moretti hoped would bring a change in literary history. It is therefore consequen-
tial that we adopt here a Braudelian definition of comparative literary history:
“Comparative literary history is a [...] collaborative interdisciplinary study of the
production and reception of literatures in specific social and cultural contexts
[...]. [C]omparative literary history examines literature as a process of cultural
communication within one language area or among a number of them without
attempting to minimise cultural diversity.” (Valdés 75)
We want to foster a reflection on the future possibilities of comparative
literary history in the age of BD. With Valdés’s definition of comparative literary
history in the background, our coordinates are: 1) CDS in terms of scientometrics
applied to bibliographic databases in literary studies (second-order distant read-
ing, in contrast to Moretti’s and Jockers’s first-order distant reading), as 2) a
complement of Moretti’s quantitative data analysis, within 3) Kaplan’s first circle.
For this we propose to empirically analyze the relations between the evolution of

the minor-literature constellation16 using the MLAIB to review the assets of minor
literatures in Europe and to approach their effects by means of their growth and
decline over time, their distribution and diffusion according to languages, their
sources and subjects, and the dimension of their authors (in terms of participation
and co-authorship).
3 A Bibliometric Analysis of the Minor-Literature

Constellation in the MLAIB
The introduction of new assets linked to DH, such as digitalization, online diffu-
sion, proper classification of literature by (meta)data, etc., has allowed for better
dissemination and a more insightful view of different kinds of texts. Many works
and activities of traditional literary culture now concern digital media (Paulson 8).
Among many changes that digitalization has brought, the threshold of attention
to humanities, prior to the phenomenon that would assert itself specifically as DH,
has allowed for the achievement of an enrichment of texts’ details and attributes.
The digital assets foster an increasingly widespread dimension, sustaining models
of research, discovery, and knowledge of literary products, opening up to niches
and to resources often confined to languages of belonging and creation. In this
direction, a further step is then to reconsider DH, and moreover DH-CL, focusing
on the possibilities that are offered to minority languages by the technological
improvement not only as far as content and distribution are concerned, but
especially in the light of the new shape of classifications, which now allow for a
greater capillarization of data representing the details of these resources.
Minor literatures have increasingly been catalogued and there has been a
further capillarization of less widespread languages, which can be perceived as an
advantage in terms of visibility and availability for minority languages, since
certain profiles traditionally did not consider minority languages at all. Socio-
16 One of the anonymous reviewers claims that “being [minor literature in the Deleuzean sense]
an epitome of deterritorialisation, it [...] can hardly constitute one and the same ‘minor-literature
constellation’ with the ‘small literature’ and ‘minority literature’.” We disagree insofar as, on the
one hand, the political dimension of minor literature – in the Deleuzean sense – is often most
evident in kleine Literaturen and, on the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s “artificial language”
(Kafka 16), including linguistic deformation, is often striking in minority literature. Paradoxically,
Deleuze and Guattari do not provide a single example of Kafka’s minor use of “Prague German” in
Kafka, but they cite examples from Antonin Artaud and Louis-Ferdinand Céline (cf. Bogue,
Deleuze 101).

cultural disruption, and in this case, aspects of literary sociology also reevaluate
the contribution of the dataset in terms of how information can circulate not only
from a profiling top-down vertical (academic) action, but also through a series of
procedures that can create grassroots data, evaluated and carried out by individual
actors, often researchers and/or experienced users, which increase the amount of
information related to every single literature by means of their overall resources.
This phenomenon can be seen as a model of cultural analytics (Manovich). It
allows us to bring together emerging aspects of digital culture, or a form of DH
designated not for the metrics of classification but for the creation and consump-
tion of resources, in order to define a quantitative measure of cultural innovation
and visually represent how cultural assets gradually change over time.
In order to approach a bibliometric analysis of a minor-literature constellation,
specifically from the MLAIB database, it is important to setup a first screening on
what we can consider minority literature according to what is officially listed as
minority languages.17 Moving from the European Charter for Regional or Minority
Languages we already have a first overview of the European situation to define
the scenario. In Figure 1 (February 2018) it is possible to see the relation and the
presence of minority languages across Europe. The infographic represents the
diffusion of 79 languages used by 203 language minorities across European states
where regional or minority languages are used as well.
The ideal approaches to carry out a careful bibliometric analysis of minor-
literature constellations starting from a predefined database (in this case the
MLAIB via ProQuest) should therefore consider two possible and complementary
analyses: 1) the analysis of the minor languages as defined in Figure 1, which
expresses a possible and clear match between the minor linguistic resources and
the corresponding forms of minority literatures; 2) the analysis of all the topics
strictly related to minority literatures in order to trace the concept’s evolution and
growth in relation to the proliferation of the topic itself over the years and in
different linguistic dimensions. Both these dimensions imply the definition of
small datasets, analyzing the resources in the MLAIB database: on the one hand,
we are facing the exploration of the entire collection of data in order to retrieve
possible information concerning (minor) languages, and on the other hand, we
are limiting the dataset to a filter related to a specific topic. Other possible
instances of analysis can be conducted, but they must be considered the corre-
spondence between the defined research fields (for example, where the resources
17 The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is the European convention for the
protection and promotion of languages used by traditional minorities. Together with the Frame-
work Convention for the Protection of National Minorities it constitutes the Council of Europe’s
commitment to the protection of national minorities.

come from, i. e., their original location) and the limits of available data. In the

MLAIB database, for instance, it is not possible to define an accurate location-

based match due to the lack of attributes and filters in the classification offered
via ProQuest research. For example, the total results filtered by location offers a
shift from 2,853,663 references to 220,773, including all the locations available.
Figure 1: The diffusion of 79 languages used by 203 language minorities across European States
where regional or minority languages are used (updated February 2018).

If we consider what appears from the visual patterns of Figure 1, we can approach
the MLAIB database according to the overall growth of the available resources by
decade (1840 to 2018) and by language (Figure 2). What emerges is the dominance
of specific literatures, such as English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and
Russian, over the others. If we delete these six languages from the infographic, the
result (Figure 3) is an interesting perspective of the overall resources through the
different decades.
Figure 2: The growth of resources in MLAIB considering decades and languages (1840–2018).

Figure 3: The growth of resources per decades and languages in MLAIB excluding the six
languages with more resources (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian).
Cutting those six languages, the result is a change of perspective in terms of

decades. The most fertile decade is 1970–1979, followed by 1980–1989 and 2000–
2009, so apparently there is no chronological growth of resources excluding the
main languages and considering the overall contribution of the remaining ones.
If the analysis by decade defines a scheme that is unusual, contrasting the idea of

a diachronic growth, a focus on the overall resources in the MLAIB database

related to the different languages offers the perspective of a ‘short tail’ for those
resources that do not belong to main literatures (Figure 4).
Figure 4: The ‘short tail’ of minor language resources in MLAIB.
Recognizing the idea of the “long tail” by Chris Anderson, according to which low
demand resources can collectively build a better market share than the relatively
few bestsellers, we can only observe a clear difference between the resources of the
main languages and literatures and the set of minor literatures. If we group the first
six results of the graph in Figure 4 together, we obtain two sets of languages. The
first set (including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian) con-
sists of 2,554,499 resources. The second set, including all the remaining resources
in all the languages, offers 250,631 resources, around 9.8 % of the first set. In this

sense, the “long tail” of all the remaining minor literatures cannot sustain the
quantitative comparison with the top six literature resources defined by languages.
Moving toward a more refined dataset, in order to match the European minor
languages previously recognized (cf. Figure 1) with the topic inherent to the
minority literatures themselves, a first advance to face the definition of minority
literatures in the MLAIB database is to define a key filter for all the possible
declinations around “minor* literature*.” The results move back to the beginning
of the present article, detailing some information resumed in Figure 5, where we
can observe the growth of the resources from 1940 to 2017 in terms of different
types of products and languages mapped out in the MLAIB database.
The dataset, updated on February 2018, offers 369 results filtered from 1940
(the first year with one result in the MLAIB database of the book by John Bale A
Study in the Minor Literature of the Reformation) to 2018, articulated in 186 scholarly
journals, 144 books, and 39 dissertations and theses. What emerges is the predomi-
nance of English resources (279), followed by French (40), Spanish (20),

Figure 5: Years, languages and types of documents in the MLAIB database on the topic of
“minor* literature*” (1940–2017).
German (10), Portuguese (4), Polish (2), Turkish (2), and 1 resource only for
Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Galician, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Slove-
nian, and Swedish (not considering Afrikaans, Chinese, Japanese, and other
resources not related to the minority languages in Europe). It is important to
underline that this kind of research cannot exactly focus on books and cultural
products that properly express a minor literature resource if the definition of the
metadata (in the case of the MLAIB the field ‘subject’ of the research form)
explicitly avoids classifying the resource in a meticulous way. In this sense, the
constellation of the resources considered is strictly related to the MLAIB classifica-
tion. Another key issue is the attribution of minority literature in the MLAIB to
resources related to minor authors of ‘traditional’ literature and, for our purposes,

the focus on the European minority literatures, not directly recognizable from the
features of the database (there is a lack of classification concerning the ‘location’
attribute in MLAIB). Finally, if we consider a more extensive analysis, including
in the research some related keywords such as “small” literature and “kleine
Literatur,” the final dataset increases from 369 to 376 resources: an irrelevant
threshold of variation (1.9 %). These aspects must be considered in order to

properly redefine every dataset obtained from the MLAIB database.

If we refine the dataset, excluding the resources not related to the dimension
of minority literatures in Europe, we have to remove 31.4 % of the resources

(American, Oriental, and other resources not directly linked to minority litera-
tures); however, the result is pretty similar (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Years, languages and types of documents in the MLAIB database on the topic of
“minor* literature*” (1940–2017).

Looking at the dimension of the authors in terms of participation and co-author-

ship (Figure 7), it is evident that as far as minority literature is concerned, the
tendency is still to have a sole author.
Figure 7: Years, languages, and number of authors per resource in the MLAIB database related to
European minority languages (1940–2017).
From the perspective of comparative literature, moving from the idea of defining if
in the MLAIB database there are comparative studies between, on the one hand,
minor literatures within themselves and, on the other, minor literatures compared
with ‘traditional’ literatures, we need to make an introductory statement. In order
to obtain a grounded analysis, the perspective is to consider every single minor
literature resource according to its own language of pertinence and to verify if, in
the same resource, it is possible to find a comparison with one or more other minor
literature(s) or with a ‘traditional’ literature. In order to track back this kind of
results, it is necessary to analyze every single classified subject and the title of the
resources. The definition of specific terms to classify the subject(s) of every resource
in the MLAIB can offer a broader perspective of the topics; so in these cases the best
solution is to revise the obtained dataset to double check the results from a critical
(human) perspective.
The research thus has to consider 1) the presence of all possible minor
literatures (defined by their specific languages), AND (written in capitals as a
Boolean logical operator for the search) 2) at least another literature. The first
obtained dataset, not reviewed from a critical human perspective, is represented
in Figure 8, offering a shift from the 369 resources defined for “minor* literature*”
to 8,264 resources in terms of comparative studies between minor literatures or
minor literatures compared with ‘traditional’ literatures.

Figure 8: The resources and their languages for comparative studies within minor literatures or
minor literatures compared with traditional literatures (1940–2017).
Finally, if we consider the themes of the resources mapped out, we can approach
the MLAIB database according to the specific attributes defined in terms of
‘subject’ and ‘title.’ In order to have a visual overview of the most important terms
adopted to classify all the resources on the minority literature topic, we can obtain
a balanced visual cloud, represented in Figure 9.

Figure 9: Balanced tag cloud of recurring terms in the MLAIB database related to minority
literature (1917–2017).
4 Concluding Remarks
This is a triply introductory essay. First, we have conducted research on the
conceptual problems that surround the concept of minor literature, which shows
the overwhelming influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s 1975 foundational book in
international academia. In contrast to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, we have
traced alternative formulations, as well as alternative concepts, as mainly singu-
larized in the works of Kafka, Kundera, and Ugrešić. Second, we have provided a
so far nonexistent panorama on the relationships between the digital humanities
and comparative literature – and, more specifically, comparative literary history.
Such a panorama proves that, on the one hand, the digital humanities need to
overcome pervading Anglo-monolingualism and, on the other hand, comparative
literature needs to open to digitalization – both as an object of study and an
analytical tool – in our digital age. In the more specific case of comparative
literary history, we have adhered to a Braudelian definition; its focus on the
production and reception of literatures in specific social and cultural contexts
could considerably profit from the amount of data processed by digital tools.
Third, we have conducted introductory research on the MLAIB database which, as
such, takes into account only a simplified approach to the analysis of the content
related to minor literatures and minor languages.18 In order to develop a more
18 One of the anonymous reviewers claims that there is a conspicuous contradiction between
minor literature (in the Deleuzean sense), DH, and “the associated methodologies (close and

extensive study, it is advisable to go beyond the purely bibliometric sphere and

approach the resources offered in the MLAIB database with more analytical and
critical study.
The database offers a series of fields that can provide different typologies of the
dataset. Nevertheless, in order to return a pertinent result related to the different
possibilities crossing and analyzing minority literatures, the classification of the
resources in the MLAIB database has to be revised by means of human screening.
The results must be analyzed in order to understand exactly how some attributes
associated with specific subjects can be declined to deepen the analysis and to
clarify a framework of comprehension to study minor literature over the decades
and the topics offered. This approach is important to understand that any dataset
emerging from MLAIB to investigate minority literature topics has to benefit from
an in-depth human parsing and analysis. In this first introductory phase, we
neither conducted a very specific database analysis – which would include cross-
ing datasets that can group single literatures and minor literatures, compare them
according to decades of development, assign subjects and exact titles and subtitles,
and co-authoring dimensions – nor did we pursue comparative studies between
minor literatures or minor literatures and ‘traditional’ literatures.
With all this considered, a logical conclusion emerges. Applying visual read-
ing and infographics can be of great support to an immediate understanding of
how resources articulate specific themes and, in this case, explain what the model
of minor literatures is; however, it is also important to reflect on a deepening of
the bibliometric analysis to be carried out not only with the establishment of the
datasets and with their strictly numerical alignments, but also with the socio-
cultural reading, the cultural analysis of the subjects, titles, and works in relation
to how they were classified within the MLAIB database. These three introductory
stages may provide firmer ground for future attempts of a comparative history of
minor literatures in European languages. In this regard, one of the main concerns
of such a history should be challenging the pervading image of minor literatures
as hyper-localized.
distant reading).” We disagree with both ideas. First, we are investigating minor literatures not
only in Deleuzean terms. Second, the associations between minor literature and close reading, on
the one hand, and DH and distant reading, on the other, are highly problematic, so much so that
close reading and distant reading are not opposites (cf. Bode). But even within the restricted field
of minor literature in the Deleuzean sense, there are interesting connections with DH, which we
cannot examine here. Cf., for example, Soulier concerning DH as agencements, whose first
conceptualization is precisely located in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka.

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On Writing A Comparative Literary History: Delocalizing Minor Literatures in European Languages in The Age of Big Data'

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Arcadia 2018; 53(2): 278–307

César Domínguez*, Giovanna Di Rosario, and Matteo Ciastellardi

Abstract: “Minor literature” is an elusive concept in literary scholarship. Its wide-

Keywords: bibliometrics, big data, comparative literary history, digital huma-

*Corresponding author: César Domínguez, University of Santiago de Compostela, Faculty of

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Consider the case of a doctoral student in a comparative literature program who is

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dictionaries and encyclopedias. She would find, to her astonishment, that no

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1 Minor Literature: (Mis)Fortunes of a Concept

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Pištelek holds a BA in German Studies also from the University of Zagreb, is it

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tion of Hannah Arendt (Volume 2) in 1948–1949. In Spanish-Castilian, in contrast,

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coterminous with Kafka’s three characteristics as listed in his scheme – Lebhaftig-

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Yugoslav literatures in post-Yugoslav times. Ugrešić’s stance is deeply ironic.

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2 Digital Humanities and Comparative Literature

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“quantitative study of science, communication in science, and science policy”

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3 A Bibliometric Analysis of the Minor-Literature

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MLAIB database, for instance, it is not possible to define an accurate location-

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Cutting those six languages, the result is a change of perspective in terms of

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a diachronic growth, a focus on the overall resources in the MLAIB database

Figure 4: The ‘short tail’ of minor language resources in MLAIB.

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properly redefine every dataset obtained from the MLAIB database.

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Looking at the dimension of the authors in terms of participation and co-author-

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extensive study, it is advisable to go beyond the purely bibliometric sphere and

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Manuel, Kate. “Researching Southwestern Literature: Challenges and Strategies.” Teaching

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