Le canon littéraire et les bibliographies numériques: le cas des États-Unis

In this research, I propose an alternative technique to the traditional method of constitution of the literary canon. Instead of basing the determination of the canon on different values, I scrutinize the Modern Language Association International Bibliography database in order to determine the most cited authors and literary works. Specifically, I study the literature of the United States of America. Thus, through the process of data mining, I obtain a sample of over 290,000 references that allows us to observe the chronological evolution and the linguistic distribution of the critical bibliography about USA literature. This quantitative technique yields a corpus of more than 100 titles and 100 writers that are cited more than 100 times in the database. Consequently, this bibliography is not the result of subjective selection criteria, but is based on the law of large numbers. Furthermore, this study shows that the quantitative analysis of bibliographic databases is an effective way to bring new light to the field of literary studies.