Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence takes the Freudian concept of an oedipal relationship between father and son as a model for the relationship that exists when one artist, the father figure (or precursor, as Bloom calls him), influences another artist (the ephebe, in Bloom's terminology). Bloom's work provides a desirable redefinition of standard treatments of influence and stylistic change in that it offers a dynamic, rather than a static, paradigm, and denies any simplistic dissociation of the artist as historical figure from the poet as poet. Furthermore, it denies that literary influences can occur as purely verbal processes, and it affirms that the creative process is emotionally charged, like so many other important human experiences.

In Anxiety of Influence Bloom states, in typically absolute terms, “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets,—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.“

In the 1860s the Russian government carried out a series of major reforms that had important consequences for key dimensions of Russian society—its economy, judiciary, local administration, army, censorship, and education. Historians have generally agreed that these reforms exerted a profound influence upon Russian historical development, but they have not arrived at an analogous consensus on how the reforms of the 1860s affected the general development of the country as a whole or the peasantry in particular. In this article I seek to analyze the immediate effect of the reforms of the 1860s on the fundamental institution of the peasantry—the commune. I shall employ a sociological approach, a mode of analysis for which the specialized literature is both rich and diverse, in an attempt to determine the underlying structural principles of the commune and to construct an analytical model for the functions and the development of the repartitional land commune.

Prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons has long been a theme of the Soviet! Union's declaratory arms control policy. It has also found concrete expression in Moscow's endorsement of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America of 1967 (Treaty of Tlatelolco), the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, and, since 1958, in the stringent nuclear export policy of the Soviet Union. Although much of Moscow's nonproliferation rhetoric and elements of its nonproliferation behavior can be explained in terms of narrow self-interest (namely, prevention of access to nuclear weapons by traditional adversaries), the range and consistency of its nonproliferation efforts, as well as certain specific actions, indicate that the Soviet leadership appreciates the dangers posed by the diffusion of nuclear weapons.

The Western ideal of journalistic objectivity, influenced by liberal principles of the rulers' accountability to the ruled and the empirical skepticism of science, developed as an occupational response by journalists to marketplace competition among commercially or politically motivated suppliers of information and came to define the journalist's professional ethic of impartiality and independence. At the same time the term professionalism must be used advisedly. Journalism is a field with some but not all of the attributes of a profession. By the usual tests of the freedom of the practitioners to govern entry and exit from the field, to possess an exclusive right to carry on their trade, and to set the standards of performance, journalists are not as autonomous as, for example, physicians and attorneys. If they sought to close the shop to outsiders or to set standards of writing and reporting, they would be infringing upon the prerogatives of “management”—editors and publishers.