Abstract

Free and open to everyone. No registration required.

Mellon CDI Visiting Fellow Professor Marjorie Garber (William R Kenan Jr Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University), will give an open lecture.

Whatever happened to “influence studies”? With its impassioned vision of an Oedipal struggle between older poets and newer ones, influence was a critical and theoretical watchword in the late twentieth century. But after the advent of the Internet, e-research, and Google searches, such contestatory terms have fallen out of fashion, and seem now almost quaint or obsolete. In an era where “truth” and “reality” seem up for grabs, it may be time to reconsider what is at stake, then and now, in claims about poetic influence, originality, and the making of art.