Highlights from the AILC-ICLA 2025 Annual Lecture

Report by Simone Rebora

The first AILC-ICLA Annual Lecture, which inaugurates a new series aimed at engaging the AILC-ICLA community in between the traditional Congresses, took place on 20 November 2025, graciously hosted by the Goldsmiths Centre for Comparative Literature and by our honorary president Lucia Boldrini.

Chaired by Yina Cao and Fotis Jannidis, the Lecture was introduced by Marko Juvan, who spoke about the constitution of the “Digital Comparative Literature” Research Committee (DCL), aimed at exploring the intersection between comparative literary studies and the digital humanities. Juvan highlighted the role of the DCL Committee in the organization of the Lecture, focused on a topic (“Perceptions of Literariness Across Borders”) that epitomizes the fruitfulness of the encounter between the two research practices. He then presented the main guest, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, to a rapidly growing audience—reaching a total of 107 connected people.

In her talk, van Dalen-Oskam entertained the audience with a thought-provoking overview of the results of two connected projects: The Riddle of Literary Quality (carried out in the Netherlands between 2012 and 2020) and Novel Perceptions: Towards an Inclusive Canon (in the United Kingdom between 2020 and 2022). Both projects were characterized by the innovative combination of empirical and computational methods to study a fundamental issue in comparative literature: the varying perceptions of literariness in different cultural contexts. The empirical side of the research consisted in a series of large-scale surveys (involving thousands of participants), aimed at collecting the evaluations of hundreds of books, both in terms of perceived literariness and of general appreciation. The results of the surveys were then combined with the computational analyses of the texts themselves, with the goal of finding patterns connecting their intrinsic textual features to readers’ evaluations. The technique most widely used was that of stylometry, originally developed in the field of authorship attribution but frequenlty used to perform a “distant reading” of wide textual corpora.

The results of the analyses highligted a characteristic feature of this type of interdisciplinary research: its tendency to produce unpredictable outcomes, which could either confirm or contradict a researcher’s expectations, stimulating new questions and opening new perspectives. Therefore, while not overlooking confirmatory results (such as the direct correlation between perceptions of literariness and appreciation; or the seprated stylometric clustering of books evaluated positively and negatively), van Dalen-Oskam payed particular attention also to the exceptions, such as the most unexplicable differences emerging between evaluations in the Dutch and British context, or the elusive stylometric classification of texts escaping from the clusters of perceived literariness. In multiple cases, attention was driven towards the role of translations, which substantially impacted both the perceptions of readers and the stylistic fingerprint of texts.

The talk was then closed by two important remarks. The first one on the (good) practice of replicability, fostered by the open sharing of all materials collected during the research, allowing other researchers to perform additional analyses and eventually propose new interpretations. The second one on the inevitable limitations in the projects, aimed at comparing two different countries, but exploring them in two very different historical periods (with the Covid pandemics sharply separating them). In this regard, van Dalen-Oskam did not hide her “dream project” for the future, which should extend the analysis to many more countries, ideally exploring them in parallel.

The Q&A session was opened by the respondent Massimo Salgaro, who stimulated a discussion on a series of issues, ranging from the selection of participants in the surveys, to the role of linguistic features in the stylometric analyses. And to the last question, about the possibility of deriving a theory from her empirical-computational explorations, van Dalen-Oskam simply—or provocatively—answered by stating: “I think Bourdieu was right!”

The video recording can now be found on the Annual Lecture page.