This blog post was written by Sam Carter and Alejandra Decker in collaboration with Tom McEnaney. Sam is a lecturer at Dartmouth College who specializes in Argentine and Mexican narrative from the 19th through the 21st centuries. Alejandra is a PhD candidate focusing on Mexican and Latinx literature in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley.
The vast regional, linguistic, and cultural diversity of Latin American and Hispanophone Caribbean literature already poses some of the same problems as the broader topic of world literature. Without the resources on hand to try to represent all of these different national and transnational traditions, our group focused on one country that stretches to the very south of Latin America (Argentina) and another at the region’s northernmost point (Mexico). That geographical range, however, isn’t meant to assume any kind of representational totality of Latin American literature, and we hope to add to the corpus with texts from Central America, the Andes, and Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the future. Those other countries and areas will introduce their own particularities, but, for the present, we followed the same general protocols as the other groups within the collective (compiling third-person fiction from 2015-2020) to build a database of contemporary Argentine and Mexican literature, two countries with robust publishing industries and vast reading publics, but with different cultures of reviewing.
Finding Reviewed Works:
A 2015 article in the Guardian stated that Buenos Aires has more bookstores per capita than any city in the world: about 25 bookstores per 100,000 inhabitants. With so many options available in the capital city and beyond, reviewers need to stay busy, and there are dozens of different formats for readers to find reviews. Rather than select only the most widely read venues like our colleagues who built the Japanese corpus, we included reviews from outlets with broad circulations as well as more specialized magazines and online journals. This was done, in part, to try to capture a sense of different reading publics, although a more thorough attempt would require a deeper investigation into circulation numbers, subscriber demographics, etc. In terms of the more popular publications, Sam combed through the weekly cultural or literary supplements of major newspapers, which included Radar (Página/12) and Revista Ñ (Clarín), as well as the book sections in La Nación and Perfil. (Given that Argentine newspapers proudly wave the flags of their partisan orientations, this distribution also ensured some diversity in terms of political ideology.) On the other hand, Sam also focused on books that were reviewed in publications wholly dedicated to literature and culture, including magazines and sites like Bazar Americano and Otra parte. One limitation of those publications is their strong affiliation with the country’s largest city, Buenos Aires. In order to ensure there was some regional diversity, Sam also consulted La Capital (Rosario) and La Gaceta (Tucumán), both of which had easily navigable book review sections. This approach—mixing scales of circulation, ideological bias, and regional reach—aimed to get as capacious a sense of contemporary fiction within the country as possible. Our initial gender ratio for both the Argentine and Mexican lists, before sampling down to 100 texts, was 66% men and 34% women for Argentina and 72% men and 28% women for Mexico.
Gathering reviewed works in Mexico posed different challenges. Although Mexico, like Argentina, is a country of book lovers (Mexico City has one bookstore for every sixteen thousand residents), Alejandra had difficulty locating sources for the book reviews at first, especially because many of the publications that focused on literature were short-lived, and / or academic reviews. And while established online and print venues like Letras Libres and La Jornada Semanal included regular book reviews, the majority of books were non-fiction. After these stumbling blocks, Alejandra consulted some colleagues for recommendations, and found that a newer publication, Revista de la Universidad de Mexico published regularly and attracted compelling writers.
Metadata
Once Sam found a review, he checked whether the text was originally written in Spanish and whether the author was Argentine. (Perhaps this is also an issue in Japan with writers from the diaspora, or in Brazil with writers from Portugal, but the Argentine publications’ extensive coverage of work that originally appeared elsewhere and then made its way into Spanish or into Argentina made this extra step a necessity.) In some cases, he immediately recognized a name that was from another part of the Spanish-speaking world; others required some extra search engine work since some reviews wouldn’t make it clear. Quickly reading through the review would often help him get a sense of whether the narration was in the first or third person, but here, too, he would sometimes need to turn to previews of books that were available through publishers’ sites, Google Books, or even previews on Amazon. Ultimately, he gathered metadata for author name, title, year of publication, publisher, where reviewed, review date and other places the book was reviewed.
The first-person requirement posed a particular problem for Alejandra’s Mexico corpus. The majority of fiction books had to be left off our list because they were written in first or second person. Like Sam, Alejandra had to be creative about how to determine narrative voice: she downloaded a free kindle chapter and skimmed chapters, looked over youtube reviewers who discussed the book’s narration, and tried to find videos of authors reading their work aloud. And, once she compiled her list, only about sixty percent of the books that matched our categories were even available for purchase from the United States or Canada. In the end, however, Alejandra compiled metadata like Sam’s but also included the genre (novel or collection of stories), city of publication, and notes on whether the work switches between first and third person.
Observations and Challenges
The domain knowledge to determine which publications to consult, the biases of those sources, and the regional differences within a country’s print industry isn’t something we typically discuss in literary research, but the lack of that knowledge, especially for researchers outside the country, presents real difficulties for selecting sources. On the other hand, drawing on our own knowledge of these countries and consulting with colleagues, we felt we were ultimately able to represent an exemplary portrait of contemporary fiction publishing in Argentina and Mexico…with some caveats. The lack of first-person narrative, especially in Mexico, shifted the sample, and will no doubt alter what our computational approach can tell us about contemporary fiction. However, this fact is already a finding: first-person narration in Mexico is having a moment. We also realized that Mexico’s network of literary magazines is growing, and we might find a very different picture of fiction based on reviews in just a few years. Lastly, the uneven access to purchasing books—some titles can be bought from the U.S. and Canada, or can be found online, whereas others remain unavailable outside Argentina or Mexico—also affected our sample, and those missing books tell a story more familiar to accepted theories of world literature: the story of circulation. Less discussed are the barriers to circulation. Understanding those obstacles should be part of the collective’s project at some stage.
World Literature Data Collective 