Harold Bloom famously dubbed it the “anxiety of influence” (paywall): the effect which the literary canon has on writers. Less today than it did in the past, according to a mathematical study which analysed thousands of works written over the last 500 years.

American mathematicians, led by the chair of Dartmouth College mathematics department Professor Daniel Rockmore, set out to investigate “large-scale” trends in literary style. Using digitised works in the Project Gutenberg library, they processed 7,733 works from 537 authors written after the year 1550, were looking for the frequency at which 307 “content-free” words – such as “of”, “at” and “by” – appeared. They called these words the “syntactic glue” of language: “words that carry little meaning on their own but form the bridge between words that convey meaning”, and thus “provide a useful stylistic fingerprint” for authorship.

“When we consider content-free word frequencies from a large number of authors and works over a long period of time, we can ask questions related to temporal trends in similarity”, they write in their new paper, “Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature”.

After finding that authors of any given period are stylistically similar to their contemporaries, they also discovered that the stylistic influence of the past is decreasing. While authors in the 18th and 19th centuries are still influenced by previous centuries, authors writing in the late 20th century are instead “strongly influenced” by writers from their own decade. “The so-called ‘anxiety of influence’, whereby authors are understood in terms of their response to canonical precursors, is becoming an ‘anxiety of impotence’, in which the past exerts a diminishing stylistic influence on the present,” they write. This could, they suggest, be explained by the modernist movement, in which authors “reject their immediate stylistic predecessors yet remain a part of a dominant movement that included many of their contemporaries”.

I understand and respect this trend and why it is happening. I would also like to somehow reverse it. I feel like we are who we once were, and could be so much more noble for that, if we would simply embrace our literary past. But no one - save a few English Lit majors and linguists and obviously the people who wrote the above article - cares to read into our literary history. I’ve only met 2 people who read Paradise Lost, and a scant half dozen who’ve read The Divine Comedy. No one “likes” Shakespeare anymore and the practice of literary theory is dissolving at a disturbing rate.

This is why I read the classics and adore them. There was a time for rejecting our past and all this “anxiety of influence” but that time has passed. What are we still afraid of?

(Source: thelifeguardlibrarian)