Draft Programme

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 characterized as an
agonised and agonistic misreading of great precursors, by authors under the pressure of Freudian anxiety.

However, the land lies differently in 2023, and the essential questions that Bloom tackled 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.

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Anahid Nersessian is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a scholar of poetry, specialising in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, with particular interests in the history of aesthetics and critical theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the practice of literary criticism. Her books include Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (2022), which was a finalist in the Poetry Foundation’s 2022 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (2020), and Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (2015). An influential pair of essays, written with Jonathan Krammnick, entitled ‘Forms and Explanations’, appeared in Critical Inquiry in 2017. In the 2022-23 academic year, Nersessian will be the American Philosophical Society fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst, described by John Banville as “one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time.” A distinguished practicing psychotherapist, Phillips was previously Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London. He has written more than two dozen books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993), with Leo Bersani Intimacies (2008), and Unforbidden Pleasures (2015). He is currently General Editor of the works of Sigmund Freud for Penguin, and has been Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of York since 2004.