Heteroglossic Literature: Yeva Biss Digital Analysis

Ali Karakaya Student_name

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Project Overview

During a two-quarter residency at Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), in collaboration with undergraduate research interns Avelyn Batts and Sara Simoni, I investigated the heteroglossic oeuvre of Yeva Biss (also known as Eva Bissová, 1921–2005), a writer from Prešov, Slovakia.

Research Focus

My research examines Biss's literary identity within the entangled frameworks of imperial legacies and localized cultural traditions. Drawing on theories of small literatures and literary hybridity, I employ natural language processing (NLP) techniques—such as named entity recognition and term frequency analysis—to substantiate my central thesis: that in the literary context shaped by (post-)Habsburg heteroglossia and Stalinist indigenization policies, the choice of language for literary production can, in fact, be strategically arbitrary, and does not anchor the author in the national tradition of the language they choose to write in.