by Rose Facchini
Gisèle Sapiro’s Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur mondial? Le champ littéraire transnational (Seuil, 2024) studies the role of intermediaries (publishers, literary agents), translators, and mediators (critics, literary prizes, and literary festivals) in the making of world authorship. An English translation by Cathy Porter for Polity Press is forthcoming, as are translations into Spanish, Croatian, Russian, Bengali, and Hindi. For the JHI Blog, Rose Facchini interviewed Gisèle Sapiro, an eminent and award-winning historian of the circulation of ideas, about her recent book and its place in her intellectual trajectory.
Rose Facchini: Can you tell me about your background and what ultimately led to this project?
Gisèle Sapiro: Early on, I was trained in comparative literature and philosophy. After discovering Pierre Bourdieu’s work, I turned to sociology and began, under his supervision, my doctoral dissertation on the political choices of French writers during the German Occupation.
Having been a translator myself and having been trained in translation studies during my BA and MA, I started, after my first book, French Writers’ War, 1940-1953 (Fayard, 1999/Duke UP, 2014), to work on two projects: one on literary trials in France and the struggles for freedom of expression since the beginning of the nineteenth century, entitled La Responsabilité de l’écrivain (Seuil, 2011), and another on the circulation of literary works in translation from a sociological perspective, which led to several special issues of journals and edited volumes. At some point, to address the question of world authorship, my studies on translation converged with my research on authorship. The circulation of books in translation is closely related to the issue of authorship: after translation, works still appear under the proper name of the author, with the translator always coming second. Since I had worked on processes of consecration and had studied the consecrating power of a publisher like Gallimard, based on their archives and also their database (they had invited me to consult both of these in order to contribute to the catalogue of the exhibition marking the centenary of the publishing house), I undertook this book project on the making of world authorship.
The study of world literature has been undergoing something of a renaissance. Traditionally, “world literature” referred to the world canon—those works read by the whole world. Pascale Casanova’s brilliant book The World Republic of Letters (2008 [1999]), together with David Damrosch’s redefinition of “world literature” as the literature that circulates, created a whole research domain. Following Foucault’s question, “What is an author?”, I asked, “What is a world author?”, and following Bourdieu’s question, “Who creates the creator?”, I asked, “Who creates the world author?” While Casanova focused on the authors and sometimes the translators and critics, I complemented her framework by focusing on institutions and authorities such as publishers, literary agents, prizes, the UNESCO, and literary festivals, and by focusing not only on mechanisms of autonomization but also on heteronomous factors: political, economic, or social. I wanted to understand what factors other than literary value lead to transnational consecration, since it seemed to me that many valuable works don’t get enough recognition because of the authors’ gender, ethnicity, or geographic origin. My book aims at unveiling these mechanisms of exclusion or marginalization. I also introduced quantitative analyses that map the geography of literary circulation.
RF: Did your data reveal moments where quantitative trends and individual case studies diverged, and how did you reconcile those tensions in your analysis?
GS: I always combine quantitative methods with qualitative ones—either archival research or, for living actors, interviews and observation (sometimes all of them, when possible), and of course, discourse analysis (for instance, when studying the critical reception of a work). I also usually check and complete the databases I use—in this case, databases of translated books—or build them myself, as I did for literary festivals, and in other research, for the prosopography of writers.
The statistics that I develop are descriptive rather than explanatory, and the exploratory methods I use—Multiple Correspondence Analysis (a geometric representation of the data) and network analysis—visualize relations, which require qualitative knowledge to be interpreted. Descriptive statistics reveal probabilities or tendencies; determinism does not exist in the social and human sciences, and one should distinguish between determinism and determination: human action is determined by an ensemble of variables which orient it and render it more or less predictable according to the situation, but multicausality and the greater or lesser capacity of individuals to adjust to new situations leaves room to maneuver within a constrained space of possibilities.
So in principle there is no epistemological problem if a qualitative case differs from the statistical probabilities, but it is important to identify whether a case contradicts trends or expectations. Works that go against the grain often require specific promotional strategies from actors. For instance, while Western publishers’ interest in Eastern European literature declined after 1989, the Polish editor Olga Tokarczuk told me in an interview how she managed to get her work translated into French—although with a marginal Swiss publisher—but this became the first step towards international recognition, which eventually led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Tokarczuk. Another example is the not-for-profit American publisher Ugly Duckling, launched by a PhD student who began publishing translations of poetry from Eastern European countries at a time when the American book market welcomed neither poetry nor Eastern European literature.
RF: What intellectual or ideological assumptions underlie the processes by which certain authors are elevated to global status, and how do these assumptions change across different historical moments?
GS: The world market for modern literature, which emerged by the end of the nineteenth century with the formation of national identities, was androcentric and Eurocentric. The “national writer” was a man, despite the fact that many women were writing and publishing. And this market was first organized internationally: the national became a literary category alongside genre. The internationalization process did not oppose but actually fostered nationalization. Panoramas and anthologies of German literature, Italian literature, and Spanish literature proliferated, written or compiled by specialists in these literatures.
American literature emerged in the 1930s, promoted by literary agents but also by mediators such as Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, a translator and professor of French at Princeton, who introduced Faulkner to then-rising publisher Gallimard, for whom he was “scouting.” Despite poor sales, Gaston Gallimard made the decision to continue translating most of Faulkner’s novels—and even short stories—in the 1930s, because he believed in their literary value. This effort was later rewarded when Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in 1949. Of course, being published by Gallimard significantly contributed to his international recognition.
This case study illustrates the cycle of long-term consecration described by Bourdieu in his analysis of the publishing field: long-term temporality characterizes small-scale circulation, which is based on the production of belief in the value of an author through specific literary authorities, whereas the pole of large-scale circulation is ruled by the law of profit and oriented toward high sales in the short term.
By that time, in the postwar period, new transnational networks were built—especially among publishers, leading to a “transnationalization” of publishing and a geopolitical opening to non-Western cultures. The Frankfurt Book Fair was relaunched in 1949 in the context of Germany’s division and the Cold War, which politicized literary exchanges, as illustrated by the Nobel Prize that Boris Pasternak declined.
The anticolonial wars also shaped these exchanges, as writers from colonized countries began to assert themselves, as exemplified by the Négritude movement. A slow movement of feminization of this transnational literary field also began. I consulted the recommendation letters in the archives of the Swedish Academy and discovered that, in 1962, for instance, only three women were recommended, compared to 66 men!
During the era of globalization, which began in the 1980s, the struggle for the recognition of cultural diversity in literature—and its feminization—accelerated, fostered by the English-speaking field, which became more dominant in this period. The proliferation of book fairs around the globe in the 1980s, followed by literary festivals in the next decade, manifested this trend toward globalization, which led to an intensification of translations but not to a diversification of linguistic exchanges.
The consolidation of publishing reinforced economic constraints on the world market for translations and strengthened the dominance of the English language. In the 1980s, 45% of books translated worldwide (across all categories) were from English. By the 1990s, this share had risen to 59% and has remained steady since. Meanwhile, French and German maintained their positions at around 9–10%, and Russian dropped from 12.5% to 2.5% after 1989, demonstrating the impact of political factors on these exchanges.
These trends are also observable in the literary field, despite a relatively higher level of linguistic diversity. Whereas large-scale circulation within the literary field is almost entirely dominated by English, small-scale circulation is diverse. The latter’s diversity is encouraged by institutions like the Nobel Prize, although the list of laureates still reflects linguistic inequalities.
RF: Regarding the transnational application of Bourdieu’s field theory, what can you tell me about the unequal distribution of cultural and symbolic capital across languages and regions, between global market logics and localized literary value systems? What does this reveal about who gets to become a ‘world author’?
GS: We owe to Pascale Casanova the first transnational use of Bourdieu’s field theory, showing the gradual unification of this “world republic of letters” around an unequal competition for recognition. She speaks of the linguistic-literary capital of languages, which indexes their antiquity and the number of their works that have entered the world canon.
To take into account the diversity of countries and languages, we nevertheless need to combine field theory with Immanuel Wallerstein’s center-periphery approach, which allows us to spatialize relations of domination. Following Abram de Swaan’s analysis of the world system of languages, Johan Heilbron has heuristically transposed the center-periphery model to the market for translations.
I have added the asymmetries between countries: translations from English come mostly from the US and the UK, rather than other English-speaking countries. Analyzing the geographical flows of translation reveals their centralization around a few cities: London, New York, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Berlin, and so on. Your chances of gaining international recognition increase significantly if you are published (either in the original language or in translation) in one of these cities.
Of course, this also depends on the consecrating power of your agent and your publisher. There are dominant publishers in peripheral countries as well as dominated publishers in central countries. It is interesting that the Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux was published in the US by Seven Stories, a small independent publisher now distributed by Penguin, while in France she is published by Gallimard, a publisher endowed with very significant transnational symbolic capital in the literary field, with 43 Nobel Prize laureates in its catalogue (either in the original language or in translation). This asymmetry is telling of the reversal of power relations between Paris and New York, which in the mid-1970s started taking over the former’s position as center of the world republic of letters.
RF: If world literature is actively constructed through unequal cultural and institutional networks, what does that mean for how we read, teach, and value global authors, especially those from marginalized languages or traditions?
GS: The world literary canon was dominated by white, male Western authors. This canon was contested by feminists and by the Black minority in the US. However, the issue of linguistic diversity has often been overlooked in the US. Whereas in the past traditional comparative literature required mastering several languages, one can now observe a trend toward studying world literature in English.
At the same time, academia has a very important role to play. Non-Western literatures first emerged on international scenes thanks to the efforts of Western scholars, who were often translators and commentators that served to legitimize these works. One example is the CARAF Books series of translations at the University of Virginia Press, which contributed to the consecration of Francophone literature from Africa and the Caribbean.
More should be done to recognize authors writing in languages that are peripheral in the world market for translations. In 2022, the Booker Prize was awarded for the first time to a novel translated from Hindi: Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree. This marked growing awareness of these other languages. In 2024, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Korean author, Han Kang, for the first time.
RF: Can counter-hegemonic literary movements outside dominant languages and markets thrive in the transnational literary field, or are they usually absorbed and neutralized by it?
GS: Small publishers operate within a transnational network and try to counter the hierarchies of the global market. Sometimes they succeed, but their successes are quickly appropriated by large companies. This happened in France, for instance, with Elfriede Jelinek, who was first introduced by a small publisher, Jacqueline Chambon, but later moved to Le Seuil once she gained wider recognition. Authors are encouraged to make such moves by their agents, who seek higher profits. It often happens that Nobel laureates, even when initially promoted by small publishers, move to larger companies after receiving the prize, and this is understandable, since in many cases, small publishers simply lack the means to widely disseminate their work.
Another example is the UNESCO program for “Representative Works,” which was set up in 1947 to foster translations from non-Western cultures. The program was successful in the sense that it encouraged Western publishers to import both classics and contemporary works from Eastern cultures and thus helped to legitimize their literature. Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese Nobel laureate (in 1969), was first translated into French thanks to this program. However, the program mainly benefited translations into UNESCO’s two official languages, English and French. As a result, it reinforced the consecrating power of these central languages, which often mediate translations from one peripheral language to another.
Nevertheless, such institutions do play a role in diversifying the world literature landscape. A recent example is the American PEN Club, which—under Salman Rushdie’s leadership and thanks to Esther Allen—criticized the very low share of translations in the American book market (only 3 percent), and created an international literary festival, the World Voices Festival, along with a translation prize to recognize voices from other cultures.
RF: What kinds of structural changes are needed to shift this? What strategies have you seen authors or publishers use to successfully bypass traditional gatekeepers in the global literary market?
GS: Generally, authors writing in a peripheral language prefer to try to find an agent in a central language in order to access the transnational literary field, just as Ismail Kadaré did. His French publisher also acted as his agent and promoted his work in French translation, which Kadaré could review himself. This greatly facilitated further translations, which would have been much more difficult from Albanian due to the scarcity of translators from that language.
One of the most interesting strategies today is international co-publication. For example, the publisher Jimsaan—launched in Senegal by Nafissatou Dia, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Felwine Sarr—co-published, with the small French independent publisher Philippe Rey, Mohammed Mbougar Sarr’s novel La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes, which went on to win the Goncourt Prize. This publisher was created to translate into French writers working in Wolof and other African languages—languages that are rarely translated and whose literatures therefore struggle to circulate in the global market. I have also met similar publishers in India, such as Urvashi Butalia, the founder of Zubaan Books, who translates across Indian languages and courageously promotes women’s voices and counter-cultural stories.
Academia, too, can play a role in consecrating literature from “peripheral” regions, as demonstrated by my earlier example of the CARAF Books series at the University of Virginia Press.
RF: How do acts of political resistance conducted within the literary field influence the kinds of stories and voices that reach international audiences?
GS: Political issues can generate interest in the literature of a particular language. This was the case for Eastern European literature under communism. Anticommunist networks sought to promote dissident literature and often emphasized the ethnographic or testimonial dimension of these works in translation. A well-known example is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for his testimony on the gulag prison system. We can observe a similar interest in Chinese dissident writers.
However, publishers evaluate literature unevenly across geographies. When introducing authors from peripheral literatures, publishers often blend ethnographic and aesthetic value, whereas they do not expect an ethnographic dimension from works originating in dominant countries. The interest in authors from conflict zones also creates an expectation for testimonial literature, as was the case with Algerian writers in France during the civil war of the 1990s or now with Palestinian writers from Gaza.
RF: Since translators and publishers have such power to determining an author’s global visibility, does this concentration of gatekeeping risk reinforcing existing linguistic and cultural hierarchies rather than challenging them?
GS: The concentration of gatekeeping undoubtedly reinforces existing linguistic and cultural hierarchies despite the movement toward greater diversity in world literature. It is telling that the Black authors who have received the Nobel Prize—a phenomenon that began in 1986 with the award to Wole Soyinka, followed by Toni Morrison and Abdulrazak Gurnah—all write in English and are published either in the UK or in the US. I argue that this diversification, which has indeed modified cultural hierarchies, was fostered by the English-speaking publishing field and, in turn, reinforced the domination of English in the transnational literary field.
It is above all the publishers—and especially the conglomerates—as well as the literary agents who are responsible for this concentration. By contrast, when translators act as intermediaries, they often tend to propose new authors, and it is thanks to them and small publishers that linguistic diversity in the book market increases anyway. Some foreign literature series of major publishers, such as Gallimard, also diversified their catalogues. For example, Gallimard’s Du monde entier series features works from more than 40 languages and 57 countries. But this diversification was largely driven by the rise of smaller publishers, such as Actes Sud, who invested heavily in translation. In the US, however, the mergers and acquisitions of traditional literary houses by larger groups led to a drastic reduction in translations.
RF: To go a bit beyond the scope of your book, how do you see the rise of digital platforms— such as Wattpad, fan translation communities, or social media book influencers—altering or challenging these mechanisms? Do you think that the emergence of global online readerships and self-publishing tools is democratizing access to world literary recognition, or are these still subject to similar market logics and gatekeeping?
GS: The world of self-publishing is a parallel world to that of the literary field, with its own logics of recognition based on readers’ acclaim. This can be regarded as more “democratic,” although influencers are sometimes secretly rewarded by intermediaries—just as can happen with literary critics or prize juries, though less explicitly. This parallel world existed before the internet, but the internet gave it much greater resonance. For this reason, the borders between self-publishing and professional publishing—which were in principle clear-cut despite the fact that disguised publishing also exists in professional publishing—may become increasingly blurred in the near future. This shift began when Pearson acquired the largest self-publishing company, Author Solutions Inc.
Still, I do not believe that democracy should be the principle on which the recognition of literary value is based. We do not expect the value of scientific or professional work to be judged by non-professionals, so why should this be the case for art and literature? My concern is with works that do have literary value according to the criteria of the literary field but fail to be recognized because of the author’s personal characteristics or the unequal conditions governing the circulation of literary works in translation.
Criticism is somewhat different: the possibility for readers to express their opinions on a book online, when these opinions are grounded in arguments, may indeed expand opportunities for public debate and democratic participation. Often, for instance, the comments on Goodreads are thoughtful and well-argued, and they enrich the discussion about books.
Lastly, the real challenge today is neither online readers nor self-published authors, but the capacity of AI to produce books, which will increase as authors are forced to allow their books to feature in AI training sets. By reducing the cost of a book, this may lead to the economic expansion of the cultural industries.
RF: Could you tell me about your future projects?
GS: In parallel with the circulation of literary works, I am studying the circulation of scholarly books in translation and the conditions that shape the circulation of theory. I am also working on a large project on “disinterestedness,” which I conceptualize as an “axiological operator”: in the line of Begriffgeschichte, I examine how the concept circulated in the eighteenth century between France, the UK, and Germany—moving from religion to aesthetic experience and judgment—but I also ask how it was appropriated and instantiated in the intellectual and artistic professions, and how it is used by them to distinguish themselves from manual work and trade. Finally, I published a historical sociology of intellectuals in Spanish (Argentina) and Portuguese (Brazil), and I am considering producing a French version of this work.
Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), a senior researcher at the CNRS, and a member of the Academia Europaea. She has been awarded the Silver Medal of the CNRS in 2021 and the Gay Lussac-Humboldt Prize in 2023 for her research in the fields of the sociology of literature; the sociology of translation; law and literature; the sociology of intellectuals and ideas; and the history and epistemology of the social and human sciences. Her previous publications include The French Writers’ War 1940–1953 (Duke UP, [1999] 2014), The Sociology of Literature (Stanford UP, [2014] 2024), and La Responsabilité de l’écrivain (Seuil, 2011), Les Ecrivains et la politique en France (Seuil 2018), Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur? (Seuil, 2020; forthcoming in English with Stanford UP), Des mots qui tuent. La responsabilité de l’intellectuel en temps de crise (1944–1953) (Points 2020). In English, she has also co-edited Ideas on the move in the Social Sciences and Humanities: The International Circulation of Paradigms and Theorists (Palgrave, 2020) and The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas (Routledge, 2023).
Rose Facchini is a Lecturer in Italian at Tufts University and the Editor and Italian Translator Editor for the International Poetry Review. Her main research focuses on the intersection between Italian studies and environmental humanities, with a focus on climate change and foodways. She also explores how Italy imagines the rapidly changing landscape through speculative fiction and how this correlates in the real world with policymaking and sociocultural adjustments. Her translations have been published in a wide range of journals and by various publishing houses, such as Asymptote, Snuggly Books, and West Branch, and her research appears in Military Medicine.
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: Illustration from cover celebrating World Book Year, UNESCO Courier, January 1972, CC BY-SA 3.0.
