The Anxiety Of Influence

Since the 16th century, Chinese history has witnessed an ebbing-tide in science and arts. China had been called an advanced country for her accomplishments, which can be attested to not only by astronomy (GanShi Celestial Book), arithmetic (Nine-Chapter Arithmetic), architecture (the Summer Palace) and textile skill (HuangDao-pe), etc., but also by ZhuZiBaiJia represented by Confucianism and Taoism, but this civilization remains there without any further expansion and exploration in recent and modern history, which lasts nearly 300 years. Our ancestors have cut a refulgent river for us to comfort, and we unfortunately, even deliberately, fall into the addiction of the past splendor and drown in it. The wheel of our civilizing process, as well as our thinking, stops because we were, we are and seemingly we will be busy feasting on the fruits put before our eyes by our ancestors. We are becoming what Harold Bloom named "weak poets". We believe in that we are intelligent and competent enough to excel in any fields, if only we had been fully clear of the relationship between our ancestors and ourselves. Bloom's "influence theory" helps us know how to accept our forebears' fruits, avoid their hundred-percent influence and back away from the river. Only in this way can we latecomers evoke the imagination that is buried long in the retrospect to the glorious history. In this theory, Bloom remarks that influence is anxiety. The anxiety is what Freud calls "repression", which leads latecomers to either rebound or die. Bloom offers six revisionary ratios that help us ephebes survive the influence river, which are our urgent need for producing Chinese Renaissance. This paper falls into three parts: Part One: Introduction This part presents the origin of deconstruction and a brief introduction of Harold Bloom's six revisionary ratios as well as his "Theory of Influence". It also includes the introduction of Harold Bloom and his works, the relation between Harold Bloom and his deconstruction father Jacques Derrida and the deconstructionist criticism – antithetical criticism.Part Two: Anxiety of Influence and Six Revisionary RatiosThis part expatiates Bloom's "Theory of Influence" and six "Revisionary Ratios". It goes first to the definitions of anxiety and influence, then through the illustration of the symbol "Covering Cherub" it explains the significance of the anxiety of influence. The six revisionary ratios, namely, Clinamen or poetic misprision, Tessera or completion and antithesis, Kenosis or repetition and discontinuity, Daemonization or the counter-sublime, Askesis or purgation and solipsism and Apophrades or the return of the dead, advise the latecomers to resist the precursors' influence.Part Three: ConclusionThis part evaluates Bloom's contributions to the development of Deconstructionism and literature criticism. Bloom expands the range of Deconstructionism and applies it to the field of text. To some extent, Bloom's theory overcomes the trend of nihilism in Deconstructionism. As to literature criticism, Bloom offers a theory of poetry by way of a description of "poetic influence", or the story of "intra-poetic" relationships, which has two corrective aims, respectively as "to de-idealize our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another" and "to try to provide a poetics that will foster a more adequate practical criticism".