The Death of the Plagiarist

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Notes

notes

1 Fliegelman notes that while Jefferson insisted that the Declaration had been written as “[n]either aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, [but] as an expression of the American mind,” the fact that this draft of the Declaration was written “on Dutch paper watermarked Pro Patria Eiusque Libertate (for the country and its independence) literalizes the palmipsestic character of the document” (165).

2 Fliegelman notes that this journal

appropriated the word magazine (previously meaning a warehouse for military supplies) to refer to the product. Thus “one out of many” refers to the anthologizing impulse, with its implicit stigmatizing of originality and its creation of a new whole, not out of whole cloth, but out of disparate fugitive pieces originating elsewhere. (173)

3 The quotation is from Bishop Patrick's Commentary on Exodus (1697), xx, 26, ctd in the OED.

4 Randall approaches the subject through two related claims: “first, that plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder, and, second, that plagiarism is power” (vii). She argues that plagiarism, at its root, is determined by acts of reception: “Plagiarism arises less significantly from the intentions of authors than from the judgments of readers” (viii).

5 See Charles George Trucking, 34 F. 3d at 1085; 1994 US App. LEXIS 24930 at *9; Dewilde, 797 F. Supp. at 56; 992 US Dist. LEXIS 10336 at *2, n. 1; and Jackson, 1991, U.S. App. LEXIS 11857 at *1–*2, ctd in Mirrow.

6 In at least one appellate court's decision, authored by one of the US federal bench's most distinctive judicial voices, Richard Posner, the duplicative nature of statutory language represents a rational consistency that is lost as “later authorities” begin to interpret the law's language to suggest finer distinctions:

The American Negotiable Instruments Law – the first statute drafted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws – copied the English provision word for word. Joseph Doddrige Brannan, The Negotiable Instruments Law Annotated 129 (4th ed. 1926); see also id. at 135–41. Later, however, darkness descended, and we find some authorities distinguishing among condition cases, no-obligation cases, and special purposes cases. (Herzog Contracting Corp. v. McGowen Corp., 976 F.2d 1062, 1065 (7th Cir. 1992), available <http://www.projectposner.org/case/1992/976F2d1062>)

Posner has since taken up his pen on the question of plagiarism, noting that judicial practice requires the duplication of language to maintain the stability of law, while denying that it constitutes plagiarism because there is no fraud and no financial incentive:

little value is ascribed to judicial originality – sometimes it is actually disapproved, on the grounds that it tends to destabilize law. Judges do not brag about the number of cases they have overruled, the doctrines they have slain, the doctrines they have created. They would rather be regarded as sound than as original, as appliers of law rather than inventors of it. Judges find it politic to pretend that they are the slaves of the law, never its masters and the competitors of legislators. (Posner 22)

7 Carson also notes the possibility of ambivalence about racial identity in King's plagiarism as both a product of and a response to racism:

King's skill in the appropriation of words gave him the ability to reveal his theological views with sophistication or simply to reveal his sophistication. His skill in the use of a European-American theological scholarly vocabulary may also have allowed him to conceal or disguise his underlying African-American religious beliefs, perhaps even from himself … Although there is a consistency in the views expressed in his academic papers and those expressed in his sermons, King gradually became more willing to use the emotionally charged language of the black church rather than the emotionally arid language of the academy to express his views. His writings suggest that his academic training may have given him the ability to conceal or repress his emotions and his African-American cultural roots. (310, 312)

8 Mallon also cites Virginia Woolf's observation on the ways in which her reading directs her pen: “Reading Yeats turns my sentences one way: reading Sterne turns them another” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ctd in Mallon 3).

9 See Randall: “it is important to understand the phrase ‘wanting at all costs to be an author’ quite literally – authorship and plagiarism are incompatible terms: authors don’t plagiarize” (23). But as Randall notes, this formulation is based on a tautology that makes the terms “authorship” and “plagiarism” mutually constituting: “‘true authors’ cannot plagiarize; plagiarists are not ‘true authors’” (ibid.).

10 Randall notes that Montaigne

has a self-conscious theory of plagiarism … [and] a highly developed and well-known theory of the self, a problematic self that is both the source of his writing and an obstacle to his erudition, caught between the Renaissance figure of auctoritas and his own incapacity to know or to say anything about anything but himself. But this insistence on the self is paradoxically achieved through the rewriting of others. (39)

11 The analogy to fashion is traditional in descriptions of plagiarism, most famously in Robert Greene's description of Shakespeare as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” (A Groats-worth of Witte, 1592). But even this bit of poetic disdain has its origin elsewhere, in Horace's mockery of the plagiarising Celsus:

What is my Celsus doing? He has been advised, and the advice is still often to be repeated, to acquire stock of his own, and forbear to touch whatever writings the Palatine Apollo has received: lest, if it chance that the flock of birds should some time or other come to demand their feathers, he, like the daw stripped of his stolen colours, be exposed to ridicule. (Epistles, Bk I, 4, ctd in Randall 103)

As Randall notes, these figures of the bird dressed in stolen feathers and the “poet-ape” that characterise early accusations of plagiarism are themselves part of an ironic discourse of uncredited quotation (103–04).

12 Reception, according to Jauss, is a measurement of literary value based on a text's conformity to, and violation of, the expectations that govern the reader's understanding of what constitutes a literary text:

the first reception of a work by the reader includes a test of its aesthetic value in comparison with works already read … The distance between the horizon of expectations and the work, between the familiarity of previous aesthetic experience and the “horizonal change” demanded by the reception of the new work, determines the artistic character of a literary work, according to an aesthetics of reception. Works that conform too closely to previous models are merely “culinary,” with no literary value beyond entertainment, while works that assert their originality too boldly may prove unrecognisable to readers. (See Jauss 20, 25)

13 Ctd in Randall (quoting Quérard, Supercheries, vol. 1, 72–73) 195. She notes that the metaphor is based upon the claim of improving the conquered land simply by the act of translating it into the author's language, which brings with it not a loss of authenticity but a civilising legitimacy:

Dumas extends the metaphor from one of simple conquest to one of full-blown colonization in which, Crusoe-like, the improvement and civilization of the conquered territory legitimize the conqueror's claim to ownership of it.. If plagiarism was originally the crime of kidnapping a freeman to press him into slavery, and if colonization is kidnapping on a large scale, it is on this scale that the exertion of superior force is clearly seen as positive: the virtues of territorial conquest and colonization are the political analogies used to shift copying from the category of dishonest theft to one of legitimate appropriation. (Ibid.)

14 Randall cites the case of the African novelist Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence, which was initially celebrated as “the first truly African novel” upon its publication in France and awarded the Prix Renaudot (Randall 207). After the publication of an English translation, Ouologuem was accused of plagiarising Graham Greene's novels Bound to Violence and It's a Battlefield, as well as novels by André Schwartz-Bart and other European writers. Yet even the article “exposing” these plagiarisms in The Times Literary Supplement speculates that they might constitute “a style of literary imperialism intended as a revenge for the much-chronicled sins of territorial imperialists” (Anon. ctd in Randall 204). See also Solongolo.