Please join us at the upcoming roundtable Digital Humanities: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in Translation at the AATSEEL conference in Philadelphia.

February 18, 2022, 8:00-10:00am, Salon 10 (Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown)

This roundtable brings together participants in the digital humanities project Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in Translation (19CRLT), which began at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2020 and approaches the completion of an initial phase of data collection and analysis by September 2021. This project investigates the role of translation in nineteenth-century Russian literature’s rise to prominence in world literature as a case study in the processes whereby a nationally or linguistically defined literature may achieve circulation and recognition on a global level. 19CRLT currently tracks book publications of works by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky in translation into English, French, and German from the death of Pushkin in 1837 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, comprising a growing database as well as maps, graphs, and other visualizations of the data. Future phases will add more authors and expand the scope to include other global contexts in which Russian literature became an important translated literature in the twentieth century.

Speakers will introduce 19CRLT and its components, the strategies that have guided the collection and analysis of data, and the major questions the project seeks to answer: What was the role of France in the canonization of Russian literature (was Paris, as Pascale Casanova proposed, really the most important “capital” of the “World Republic of Letters”)? Did other locales play an equally important role in this process? In what ways was the canon of Russian literature composed differently in different translated contexts? Beyond the presentation of intermediate results, this roundtable aims to provoke a robust discussion with the audience about the data-collection model, analytical frameworks, and applications of the open-source database to both research and teaching contexts. This will aid in refining and expanding the project as it moves into new phases of work over 2022.

The roundtable organizers and participants:

Chair: Kevin M. F. Platt, University of Pennsylvania

Discussants: