Les littératures franco-canadiennes dans un monde globalisé : une analyse métacritique.

The goal of this research is to empirically analyze the constitution of the subsystem of French-Canadian literatures, its inscription in Canadian literature and its relations with the literatures of the world, particularly those geographically and linguistically related to it. Theoretically, it is based on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of a field (1992), on polysystems theory developed by Itamar Even-Zohar (1990) and on scientometrics (de Solla Price 1963). From the methodological viewpoint, we have retrieved from the most important literary database, the Modern Language Association International Bibliography, references that correspond to the different literatures analyzed. The compilation and the analysis of the metadata of these references allowed us, firstly, to map French-Canadian literatures and to describe the diffusion of the critical bibliography. Secondly, we elaborated several indicators in order to study the relations of French-Canadian literatures to, on the one hand, literatures of the Americas, and, on the other hand, francophone literatures. We observed that French-Canadian literatures are characterized by their vitality, their youth, and their relative independence from other systems. We consider that this paper constitutes an illustration of the potentiality of the new observable resources of the digital age, as they may increase our understanding of the configuration and the evolution of the literary systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]