Chance Encounters: World Literature Between the Unexpected and the Probable

Abstract

This essay brings probabilistic reasoning into concerted dialogue with book-historical and sociological approaches to world literature. Using extensive bibliographic data about literary translations into Japanese during the modern era, it develops a series of case studies at interrelated scales—the literary anthology, world library collections, and individual readers—to reason about the likelihood of certain authors or works being plucked from the swirling currents of the global traffic in books. At each scale, I consider how such data might inform the interpretations we give to the choice of one author over another in a given context. Woven into these case studies is an extended reflection on the history of probabilistic reasoning from the late-eighteenth century to the late-twentieth. What, this essay ultimately asks, might literary historians gain from taking this history seriously in our own appeals to chance as a form of historical explanation?