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Literary Indebtedness and Comparative Literary Studies (influence study)

I.    Literary indebtedness: influence/ historical study

A.    Example of Shakespeare: Boccaccio and Holinshed influence his works.

B.     Many great authors admit that others have influenced them and many have even paraded their indebtedness to others. (p.85)

C.     Originality and innovation
1.      Some suggest an author's literary debts diminishes his originality; however, originality should not be understood in terms of innovation.(85)
2.      What genuinely moves the reader aesthetically and produces an independent artistic effects has artistic originality, whatever its debts. The original author is not necessarily the innovator or the most inventive, but rather the one who succeeds in making all his own, in subordinating what he takes form others to the new complex of his own artistic work. (86)

D.    Intermediary and influence
1.      Authors/ movements vs. society: Particular authors or even literary movements may produce a non-or extra-literary effect upon a whole society or a significant part of it. (87)
2.      Authors vs. literature in another country: One author's reception may lead to that of much of a whole literature in another country. (87)

II.  7 Ways of literary indebtedness: translation, imitation, stylization, borrowing, sources, parallels, influence. (88)
A. Translation(88): Translation is itself a creative act
1. Give up: Give oneself up to the form and matter of the original work and to reproduce it to a new language.
2.Show the taste of one's own time (Ex: fantasy novels/fictions)
3. Freedom( the translators): relative freedom of excision, addition and paraphrase and change of form and often of style.
4.  Not only the study of the reception of a foreign author but the study of the literature itself.
a. Authors: The relationship between the foreign and native authors
b. Form and content: transmuted(轉化) and assimilated(同化)

B. Imitation(88): The author's give up
1. Used as a pedagogic device(教學) in an artist's development.
2.    Pushkin(positive): imitations isn't 「intellectual poverty, but a noble trust in one's own strength,  the hope of discovering new worlds, following in the footsteps of a genius, or a feeling in its humility even more elevated the desire to master one's model and give it a second life.

C. Stylization(89): An author suggests for an artistic purpose another author or literary work, or even the style of an entire period, by a combination of style and materials. (for example, Pushin stylizes to convey a particular mood or background)

D. Borrowing(89): The writer helps himself to materials or methods.
1. Examples: aphorisms, images, figures of speech, motifs, plot elements. (Ex: alusion典故, literary source. )
2. Purpose: discover the relationships of the use of the material in the new work to that of the old- the artistic use to which the borrowing is put.

E. Sources( 90): used to indicate the place form which a borrowing is taken, especially the plot.

F. Parallels( 90): provide a further subject of interest and value.
1. Comparable manifestations in form or content in different authors, literatures, and perhaps at different times and with no demonstrable direct relationship to each other.
2. Juxtaposition: provides great interest and value in the criticism of each of them.
3.Values: cast on the qualities and merit of the individual works, indicating similarities and differences in national literary traditions.

G.Influence(91): contrast to imitation, it shows the author's own essential.
1.Not individual details or images, not borrowings or sources.
2. More pervasive, involving organic qualities in one's essential inspiration or artistic presentation.
3.For authors, it is from accept, transmute to the influence.
III. Influence
A.Happening(92):
1. Emergence of national literatures; 2. Radical change of direction of a particular literary tradition in a given literature; 3. Accompany or follow social or political movements.

B. Including(92):
1.  Show in style, images, characters, themes, mannerisms, world views;
2.  External evidence: mentions, allusions, quotations, diaries, the evidence of contemporaries and evidences of an author's reading must be used.
3.  Doesn't need to include borrowings.

C. Occurrence(93): within or across genre lines (it can also trace back the author's development).

D. For example(93):
1. Freud, as a one of the most potent influences on modern Western literature.
2. Philosophers and thinks: from Plato and Aristotoe…..to Karl Marx.

E.  Direct and indirect influence:
1. Example: Byron—Pushkin—Lermontov.(94)
2.  Direct: mostly happens in translations;
a.Translations not only in the conscious changes of a literary work which they often produce, but in the adaptation which any translation provides, play a special role in the inception and the transmission of literary influences(94).
b. In imitating or translation a foreign author, an author gives himself the task of adapting directly the author's style and language to the needs of his own time, language, and literary tradition. In this adapting, the translator or imitator often brings something new into his literary tradition, not only in genre and content, but also in style and diction. Phrase, metaphor, similes, and general style and diction cannot simply be borrowed from another language, but must be reshaped to fit them into the native literary tradition( along with Shakespeare's example 95).

IV.   Conclusion:
1. The literary background of each age and country varies, and hence the influence exerted by an author or literature will vary in accordance with what a given age feels it needs (95).
2. Sufficient data would become available to push these studies further back into the past (96).
3.There are many valuable insights and qualities remaining to be discovered. (both an author or a literature)(96).