Introduction – Liberal, Humanist, Modernist, Queer? Reclaiming Forster’S Legacies
Notes Introduction – Liberal, Humanist, Modernist, Queer? Reclaiming Forster’s Legacies 1. For another comprehensive monograph on different models of intertextual- ity, see Graham Allen, Intertextuality (2000). 2. See Bloom (1973). Bloom’s self-consciously idiosyncratic study has received mixed responses; its drive against formalist depersonalization has been appreciated by prominent thinkers such as Jonathan Culler, who affirms that ‘[t]urning from texts to persons, Bloom can proclaim intertextuality with a fervor less circumspect than Barthes’s, for Barthes’s tautologous naming of the intertextual as “déjà lu” [“already read”] is so anticlimactic as to preclude excited anticipations, while Bloom, who will go on to name precursors and describe the titanic struggles which take place on the battlefield of poetic tra- dition, has grounds for enthusiasm’ (1976, p. 1386; my translation). Other critics, such as Peter de Bolla, have attempted to find points of compromise between intertextuality and influence. He offers that ‘the anxiety that a poet feels in the face of his precursor poet is not something within him, it is not part of the psychic economy of a particular person, in this case a poet, rather it is the text’ (1988, p. 20). He goes on to add that ‘influence describes the relations between texts, it is an intertextual phenomenon’ (p. 28). De Bolla’s attempt at finding a crossroads between formalist intertextuality and Bloomian influence leans perhaps too strategically towards Kristeva’s more fashionable vocabulary and methodology, but it also points productively to the text as the material expression of literary influence. 3. For useful discussions and definitions of Forster’s liberal humanism, including its indebtedness to fin de siècle Cambridge, see Nicola Beauman, 1993; Peter Childs, 2007; Michael Levenson, 1991; Peter Morey, 2000; Parry, 1979; David Sidorsky, 2007.
[Show full text]