Keynotes: Professor Anahid Nersessian (UCLA; author, The Calamity Form and Keats’s Odes); Dr Adam Phillips (general editor of Freud for Penguin Books)

Link to Call for Papers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zLW330Vo0E64WGpEWt4cAg7ppaDmSafv/view?u...

Texts influence one another and influence us as readers. Half a century ago, Harold Bloom evolved a template for understanding the process of poetic influence in The Anxiety of Influence, which he characterised as an agonised and agonistic misreading of great precursors, by authors under the pressure of Freudian anxiety. The land lies differently in 2023, and the essential questions that Bloom tackled – What is literary influence? How can it be measured and studied, and to what end? How can it help us to understand texts and their authors? – are inviting new answers and methodologies from across the discipline of literary studies.

This conference invites papers which consider influence as an Anglophone literary phenomenon over the last five centuries. It is concerned with the theory of influence, specific examples of it, and new methods in criticism and research, whether imaginative, technical, or speculative. Approaches from neighbouring disciplines such as history, philosophy, and anthropology are welcome. Papers should be a maximum of 20 minutes long and are invited on all aspects of literary influence, including:

• ‘Influence’ as a critical or historical concept
• Influence beyond the canon
• Recovering forgotten or marginalised influences
• Post-colonial influence
• Influence across borders
• Queer influences
• Influence between social divides
• Influence between eras
• Influence between genres, or between non-‘literary’ and ‘literary’
• The influence of non-authorial agents on the shape of a text
• Memory, mistakes, misreading, and misremembering
• Theoretical approaches to influence, such as ‘paranoid reading’, deconstruction, and intentionalism
• The problems of revision, multiple authorship, or anonymity
• The influence of critical schools and the academy

Papers might also treat the fiftieth anniversary of Bloom’s book as a springboard, approaching topics such as:

• Renaissance influence. Bloom believed that the early moderns, the ‘giant age before the flood’, were influenced differently to later eras. How, then, did Renaissance writers make sense of influence and influence once another, and how has their influence subsequently been felt?
• The ‘apocalypse’ of influence studies? How are the digital humanities rethinking ‘source hunting’ and ‘allusion counting’ in the 21st century? Has there been a noticeable shift ‘from scholars to computers’ – the move Bloom thought would spell the ‘apocalypse’ of the industry?
• Psychologising influence. How far is it true that literary influence is a psychological process, tapping into fears, memories, or prejudices beyond the aesthetic? What about the tension between outside influence and the self? Can influence be a form of self-fashioning? 

Either way, it seems like an appropriate tribute on the fiftieth anniversary to wrestle free of the great original; swerve away from it; do something different.

The conference will be in-person at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, on Monday 25 September 2023. Email abstracts (250 words) and bios (75 words) to influenceoxford@gmail.com by Friday 26 May.

Convenors: Lewis Roberts (St John’s College, Cambridge); Jacob Ridley (University College, Oxford); Roddy Howland Jackson (Magdalen College, Oxford); Ruby Hutchings (Queens’ College, Cambridge)