Citing the world: A geometric data analysis of Swedish literary scholars’ use of foreign critical resources

•The bibliographical references of 318 Swedish PhD dissertations in literary studies were studied with regard to the use of non-Swedish secondary sources.•The academic production of “the literary” within Sweden is to a significant extent dependent on non-Swedish scholars.•Over the period 1980–2005, marked by the discourse of globalization and increasing internationalization of higher education, the reliance on international intellectual authorities in this field showed a very modest increase.•Increasing reliance on only the most frequently cited critics, suggesting that the particular national and nationalist formations of the discipline place a limit on its internationalization.•A Geometric Data Analysis of the pattern of choices showed that the choice of international authorities formed a tri-polar opposition in these field, corresponding to three basic conceptions of literature: textual singularity, secular particularity and anthropological universality.•These oppositions were also marked by a strong gender distribution and by linguistic orientations, suggesting that a distinctive German and French linguistic capital conditioned the position-takings.

The academic study of literature constitutes one institutional site for the production and reproduction of conceptions of literature. In a semi-peripheral country such as Sweden, this production partly relies on foreign intellectual goods. To analyze this transnational dimension of Swedish scholarship in a period marked by increasing internationalization, a Geometric Data Analysis (GDA) (Le Roux & Rouanet, 2004) was carried out on the bibliographies of 318 PhD dissertations, defended in the period 1980–2005, at Swedish departments of literary studies (litteraturvetenskap). The analysis of citational choices showed only an insignificant increase in the reliance on foreign sources in this period. The GDA revealed how these privileged references were distributed in a tripolar opposition, reflecting fundamentally different conceptions of literature, interpreted in this study as the three poles of textual singularity, secular particularity and anthropological universality. The analysis of supplementary variables shows that these oppositions are subtended by different geolinguistic orientations and that they correlate strongly with gender, which is overwhelmingly in evidence as one moves from the male-dominated textual pole to the strongly feminist and female social pole of the first axis. The lack of increasing internationalization measured by citations is attributed to the “national cultural mission” of these departments.