Hello! I am Mary, a sophomore in college who dreams of writing the great American novel before the Singularity claims the last spark of human creativity.
This blog is in an experimental stage; I'll run the gamut from posting creative work to think pieces to literary reviews and analyses. I am not entirely sure what I intend to do with this just yet, so bear with me as I embark on the creative process of self-discovery! Hopefully I'll not drown in its tumultuous waters.
Let me briefly explain this blog's title. An idea that has been rambling around in my mind lately has been the concept of the "anxiety of influence" which Harold Bloom claimed affected writers, especially the male poets of the Romantic period, by engaging them in an essentially destructive process of trying to one-up their literary predecessors. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar extended this into an "anxiety of authorship" in "The Madwoman in the Attic" which plagues female writers who essentially have no predecessors in the patriarchal pantheon of literature. Emily Dickinson touched upon this in her poem "A Word dropped careless on a Page," writing, "Infection in the sentence breeds / We may inhale Despair". As a female writer, I certainly feel this anxiety, but I wanted to claim this problem which seems unique to women as a positive. We should turn the infection in the sentence into a virus, letting it spread from writer to writer to cure literature of its biases. Let minority voices be heard, and let's create a new living pantheon of black, female, LGBTQ, Latino, Asian writers to replace the ubiquitous old, white, dead guys.
That's all for now. Please keep reading! It'll be a fun ride.
P.S. The title of this post is from Keats. 10 points to Gryffindor to everyone who knew that!
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