----- Original Message -----
From: Corinne Scheiner
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 7:27 AM
Subject: RE: Fw: Fw: Speaking of plagiarism

Francoise Meltzer wrote a wonderful book on the questions of plagiarism and literary originality entitled Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (UChicago, 1994).  Here's a blurb describing her text:
 
"But is it original? The question, on which so much of writing stakes its claim to greatness, may be more interesting than the answer. In this provocative book, Francoise Meltzer takes a subtle and incisive look at the anxiety of origins at the heart of the literary enterprise. Using four case studies, Meltzer reveals the shaky status of originality as a founding principle of the critical establishment.

Freud, inventor of "dream work," turns a blind eye upon the dreams that were the starting point of his predecessor Descartes's famous methode, the one man's obsession with originality mirroring the other's fear of plagiarism. The Holocaust poet Paul Celan, whose sense of identity and place resided in his work, is devastated by a charge of plagiarism. Colette's husband Willy outdoes himself, and his "lazy" wife as well, with his enactment of literary seriousness. Walter Benjamin's early interpreters, notably Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, insidiously undermine the originality of his project . In each of these cases, Meltzer shows how a threat to a writer's status as creator betrays the larger fraud of the originality myth itself.

Fascinating for its insights into the ways originality is both at risk and at work in Western literary culture, Hot Property will engage all those who have an interest in questions of authorship, textual soveriegnty, and the legitimacy of the critical establishment."

Corinne
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Corinne Scheiner
Maytag Assistant Professor
Comparative Literature
The Colorado College
14 East Cache La Poudre Street
Colorado Springs, CO 80903
719/389-6238 tel
719/389-6179 fax
cscheiner@coloradocollege.edu

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU]On Behalf Of D. Barton Johnson
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2004 11:58 AM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Fw: Fw: Speaking of plagiarism

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Chaswe@aol.com
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2004 9:48 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Speaking of plagiarism

Isn't plagiarism a relatively modern obsession? I remember reading that Pope kept notebooks in which he recorded anything worthwhile he heard or read, for future poetic use. There is the well-known Wilde-Whistler exchange: "I wish I'd said that!" "You will, Oscar, you will". Churchill lifted his oft-quoted remark about democracy being the least bad form of government straight from Aristotle. A.J.P.Taylor is credited with "History is merely a version of events", but it seems it was said by Napoleon.

Didn't the modern concept of copyright arise in the first half of the C18th, with the development of a free enterprise economy, and when artistic pirating began to have serious   consequences for the artistic entrepreneur? Hogarth and Voltaire both became very uptight about their artistic properties. Money counts: how much did the Ur-Lolita earn its author? Meanwhile, in Travesties, Tom Stoppard makes Tristan Tzara say: "All poetry is a reshuffling of a pack of picture cards, and all poets are cheats."  Since man hasn't changed much in the last 30,000 years there isn't anything new to say, only slightly new ways of saying it; and art is inherently cannibalistic and plagiaristic, if that's really the right word.

Charles Harrison Wallace