Specters of influence

Abstract

Ezra Pound urged poets to “have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.” Many ignored the call and left it to scholars to determine their influences. For many scholars, however, studies of influence appeared to conceal more than they reveal. Edward Said regarded influence as a “linear (vulgar) idea”; Julia Kristeva rejected using the term she herself coined—intertextuality—when she noticed that it was understood “in the banal sense of ‘study of sources’”; Michel Foucault considered individual originality and point of creation two of the notions that dominated the traditional history of ideas; and Paul Valéry viewed influence as the vaguest “among all the vague notions that compose the phantom armory of aesthetics.” What was so objectionable? First, studies of influence were associated with conservative models of knowledge transfer that predominantly focused on continuities, exemplified by Ernst Robert Curtius’s proclamation that