Gastvortrag von Jean Barré: A computational analysis of the ‘birth‘ of the French detective novel

In the wake of France’s industrial and social transformations, the detective story did not spring from a single moment of genius but unfolded through a web of narrative experiments, transnational importation and thematic inquiries. In this talk, I propose to interrogate this process rather than presuppose its shape: did the genre coalesce through parallel innovations, or can we pinpoint individual breakthroughs? To do so, I will combine three computational lenses—automatic narrative segmentation to reveal the arcs of suspense and resolution, topic modeling to track the rise and persistence of motifs like crime and justice, and BookNLP–driven role extraction to chart the emergence of the investigator’s voice. By mapping these dimensions across a corpus of early French crime fiction, we will test competing models of emergence—collective weaving versus individual invention—and reflect on what such digital approaches can teach us about how literary genres take root.