Abstract
Writing never takes place in a vacuum, nor does reading. Both acts are always mediated by the writing or the reading of other texts, be they scripted, visual or otherwise symbolic. This much seems clear. If we wish to understand the nature of this mediation, just how much help can the notion of influence provide us? The term ‘influence’ is strikingly absent from the current critical vocabulary of literary scholarship and teaching. It is as if we have had to develop numerous other terms to articulate this mediation, whether it is explicit and manifest, needing only to be restated, or cloaked and covert, requiring extensive interpretive pressure to be teased out. Some of the terms used to describe this mediation of other texts are synonymous with influence, but most reflect a guarded reassessment of the notion, if not a critical one.
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Notes
A recent and compelling contribution to the UK version of that history is French Studies in and for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Philippe Lane and Michael Worton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).
François Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme, 2 vols (Paris: La Découverte, 1991–92).
Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIX esiècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 60; translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez as Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 66.
See Vincent Descombes, Le Même et l’autre: quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933–1978) (Paris: Minuit, 1979).
In a 17 April 2010 Le Monde article, Roudinesco critiques Michel Onfray’s Le Crépuscule d’une idole: l’affabulation freudienne, a defence of Freud she pursues in Mais pourquoi tant de haine? (Paris: Seuil, 2010).
Étienne Balibar, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple (Paris: La Découverte, 2001).
Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010).
Transferts: les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles), ed. by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1988), p. 5. My translation.
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Les Conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées’, Actes de la recherche en science sociales, 145 (December 2002), 3–8 (p. 5); translated by J. P. Murphy as ‘The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas’, in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), pp. 220–28 (p. 222).
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 23f.
Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 118; translated by Tom Conley as The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 100. Emphasis in original.
Henry Rousso, Le Syndrôme de Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1987).
Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 80.
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© 2013 Daniel Brewer
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Brewer, D. (2013). Introduction: Influence: Form, Subjects, Time. In: Baldwin, T., Fowler, J., de Medeiros, A. (eds) Questions of Influence in Modern French Literature. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309143_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309143_1
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