Lauren Groff: The Anxiety of the Influence of The Anxiety of Influence (January 2020)

The literary critic Harold Bloom (RIP, 2019) was most famous for his 1973 book Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, in which he argues that artists struggle Oedipally against their precursors, framing his argument with Freudian jargon. This lecture (not unironically) explores the assumptions underlying Bloom’s theory, drawing on examples from Anne Carson and others to offer an alternative vision of an artist’s attitude to her precursors.