The vexed relationship between postcolonial literature and the market has featured prominently in a range of work in postcolonial studies in the past two decades. Many scholars have expressed concern over the homogeneity of works made available by the postcolonial culture industry, operating on the hypothesis that metropolitan readers would be confronted with a different, perhaps less “exoticizing” perspective on the countries and cultures for which postcolonial authors have been presumed to speak were they to read other works, for example, those produced for a “domestic” audience. In this presentation, I will discuss a project that attempts to evaluate and concretize this hypothesis by way of a computationally assisted comparison of English-language novels written by authors of South Asian descent with a corpus of contemporary fiction translated from South Asian languages into English. Using a series of quantitative proxies for two of central criteria of distinction adduced to by scholars— literariness and cosmopolitanism — we aim to establish 1) whether and how the works of the authors writing in English can be seen to constitute a coherent corpus vis-à-vis the translated works and 2) whether and how the former converge with literary fiction translated from two languages considered to possess high literary capital: French and German. By situating postcolonial bestsellers within this broader context, we hope to provide a starting point from which to understand more fully the ways in which pressures exerted by the “otherness industry” influence literary production as well as how reader perceptions of South Asia might be different if they were exposed to a broader range of texts.

 Matt Erlin's research focuses on the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. In addition to essays on topics ranging from Moses Mendelssohn's philosophy of history to the eighteenth-century novel, Erlin has published two books: Berlin’s Forgotten Future: City, History, and Enlightenment In Eighteenth-Century Germany (2004) and Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770-1815 (2014). He has also co-edited, together with Lynne Tatlock, two essay anthologies: German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation appeared in 2005, and Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century was published in 2014.

Professor Erlin is a member of the steering committee of Washington University's Humanities Digital Workshop (HDW). Together with student and staff collaborators, he is currently working on several digital humanities projects that use computational tools to challenge traditional notions of genre and period as they apply to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature. Erlin is also a co-investigator on the multi-university partnership grant “Text Mining the Novel,” which aims to produce the first large-scale cross-cultural study of the novel according to quantitative methods.

Professor Erlin’s course offerings range widely but generally reflect his fascination with the interface between aesthetic theories and practices and the sociopolitical contexts in which they emerge. He also has a strong interest in pedagogy. In addition to general courses in German language and culture, he has taught seminars on German poetry, consumer culture and the eighteenth-century novel, Marxist cultural theory, cultural representations of nationalism, and the sociology of literature. He also teaches in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities.