William:
You may have opened a can of worms here: influence is a concept in
literary criticism and literary history that is at the same accepted and part of
common usage and hotly contested. Once you start thinking about influence, as
you obviously have, it all seems to get rather vague and undefined. Then there
is the different terminology: you have influence as a process by which one
writer consciously or unconsciously appropriates the styles, ideas or verbiage
from another writer; where this process is conscious and limited to the
borrowing of particular phrases, one can speak of dealing with sources or of
intertextuality; though, of course, intertextuality and the way it is defined in
French theory in particular is much broader too, as it becomes a matter of
discourse. Then you also have something I call "confluence", which is a form of
influence that one gets, say, when two writers or poets work together on a work.
An example of this would be Pound helping Eliot to revise The Waste
Land. (I am currently working on this idea in relation to reading notes; an
early version of an essay, which will appear in a collection on The Reader
in History, is available from the School of Advanced Study e-Repository at
http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/dspace/handle/10065/289).
I
suppose Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence is the place to start
(if you haven't already done so), but you may not find it very useful; it
puts forward a rather idealist (and very non-material) approach to influence and
poetry. Yet Bloom is still the point of reference for anybody writing about
influence. A good collection of essays presenting various aspects of the
issue is Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. by Jay
Clayton and Eric Rothstein (1991).
Particularly with your interest in verbal borrowings, and if you read
German, you should to a search on "Quellenkritik". If not, you will find much
that is useful in a book by Brian Vickers on Shakespeare, A Lover's
Complaint and John Davies of Hereford (2007), because it uses verbal echoes
in argument about the authorship of the poem. For a more theoretical
perspective, you should read the work of Quentin Skinner, particularly “Method and
Meaning in the History of Ideas”, Meaning
and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully, Princeton:
Princeton
University Press, 1988,
29-67. He tries to formulate a methodology and rationale for studying influence
in the history of ideas.
These are just a few starting points. I may think of others and will let you know.
Wim
(Dr) Wim
Van Mierlo
Institute of English Studies
School of Advanced Study
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E
7HU
http://ies.sas.ac.uk
Dear Members:
I
could use some suggestions. I have recently started a project addressing
the transmission of ideas in religious texts (focusing on the influence of
British authors on 19th Century American authors). While doing so,
however, I've run into some challenges related to identifying the presence of
borrowing between writers. It seems that different scholars have many
different approaches to identifying whether or not a writer may have lifted or
borrowed ideas from an earlier source, and I wanted to be sure that I adopted
methods that were reliable and recognized. So far, my focus has been on
the phrasing of parallel ideas shared between two writers, particularly when
identical or nearly identical expressions of an idea occur within similar
narrative contexts. But I wanted to be sure I wasn't missing any other
important methodologies that I could explore. In the end, I just hope to
enlist the help of the most reliable and convincing approaches a! vailable in
my attempts to establish the presence of lifting and borrowing, while
simultaneously avoiding the trap of using commonplaces as evidence of
transmission.
Replies on or off list are welcome.
William
Davis
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