Fear of influence

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Influence anxiety ( English anxiety of influence ) is the American literary theorist Harold Bloom introduced term, which represented an innovation of the source and impact of research and requires a special understanding of literature.

A literary text is therefore not an autonomous and only self-referential work, but rather resembles a point of intersection of intertextual effects. Intertextuality is viewed as a conflict between authors, especially with central predecessor figures.

The forerunner figure initiates the new poet into poetry through its example, in that it represents a determining superego for him, against whose powers the still weak successor must protect his originality.

The fear of influence as a mental representation of the poet's role model threatens literary creativity . In order to survive as an author in this situation, which is similar to the Freudian father-son conflict , the so-called Ephebe has to transform the fear of influence into a source of literary creativity.

After a complex process of deformation, destruction and repression of the forerunner, it is finally integrated into one's own work. In this regard, Bloom distinguishes six different defense mechanisms for identifying textual strategies that function as tropes on the rhetorical level .

In Bloom's view of literary production, all texts of the Ephebe operate as a revisionist “translation” of a previous text. The now strong poet was led by an (aesthetic) will to power to enter the tradition that survived his lifetime and to assert his authorship in the field of tension between inspiring and threatening dependence on the embodied literary tradition and his own creativity.

literature

  • Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford University Press, New York 1973.
    • Fear of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. From the American English by Angelika Schweikhart. Stroemfeld, Basel / Frankfurt a. M. 1995, ISBN 3-86109-104-6 .

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