Academic thoughts on copying and plagiarism
Unless you really want to read detailed thoughts about three academic books on copying and plagiarism, don't go beyond the cut tag -- though I have put in a few fandom-related things when they seemed relevant. This is really more for my reference than anything else (hey, cesperanza, I think you gave me these titles).
Marilyn Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power: This is a study whose thesis is that plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder. This is true on several levels: If I talk about the “ghost in the machine,” a certain set of people will recognize that this is allusion, and give me credit for knowledge. Other people won’t recognize the reference and may give me credit for rhetoric. It’s only in the latter case - and maybe only if I have deliberately tried to reach audience-2 - that we speak about plagiarism. (Wonderful, fortuitous example here, where the author of the very funny Movies in 15 Minutes journal roundly condemns plagiarism, defined as reprinting without proper credit, even with word changes, then says, “Do not post it in a box, do not post it on a fox. I do not like creative theft and ham, I do not like it, Jerk I Am,” then follows that with a note saying, “Don't [accuse me of plagiarism] --you know damn well what this is from.”)
More broadly, whether we see something as plagiarism (to be condemned) or standing on the shoulders of giants (to be lauded) depends on what we think of the plagiarist/author. Thus, a contemporary defended Ben Jonson: “What would be theft in other poets, is onely victory in him.” Randall focuses on literary plagiarism rather than scientific, journalistic, or student plagiarism, because she thinks that, unlike these other types, literary plagiarism is not just contested in definition but contested in value - a literary plagiarist will not be condemned if s/he produces a work of genius as a result, like Nabokov’s Lolita. By contrast, there is no history of considering certain types of student plagiarism to be genius or to transcend their copying and become something more worthy (of course, plagiarizing from enough sources can cross the line into research). She dissects plagiarism into its component parts, which involve theft (taking another’s work) and fraud (taking unearned credit). There’s a lot of jargon, but some interesting points, like how we currently judge and psychoanalyze the plagiarist and not the plagiarized text but do the opposite with real authors, who disappear into their texts.
With plagiarism, we are always concerned about intent, as we are with fraud. But how do we tell intent? Sometimes we infer it from the silence of the text as to source. This means that the reader’s (initial?) failure to recognize gets projected as the writer’s deviousness; the reader’s erudition may affect her judgment of the author’s intentions. (The infamous debates over Cassie Claire’s Draco series provide a good fannish example - if you knew Buffy, you couldn’t help but recognize some of the lines as borrowed from that show - they were pretty distinctive lines - and I certainly thought it was implausible that she was attempting to disguise her debts. But I was unfamiliar with some of her other source texts, so I couldn’t readily tell when the snappy patter came more directly from somebody else.) In a sense, then, “overt plagiarism” is an oxymoron.
In the wider world, people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have been accused of plagiarism or, at least, failing to credit sources in accordance with the norms of their professions. Randall makes the point that the “plagiarisms” of King and of another fellow by the name of Ouologuem, initially touted as a major African writer, have been treated not as individual or idiosyncratic failings, as the plagiarisms of white guys usually are, but as representative of some cultural or political clash. Was King copying involuntarily, because he had accepted the master’s value system? Was he copying deliberately, contemptuously? Was copying part of a particularly African-American aesthetic? A lot of these social/political theories render King’s professors either incompetent for failing to recognize the copying or reverse racists for letting him get away with it. Whether they fob blame on someone else or claim that nothing blameworthy occurred, the number of King-defenders far exceeds the number of his detractors. As Randall notes, plagiarism-hounds are unpopular, especially if they only make hue and cry after someone’s reputation is established. King did many other, more important things; why tarnish his memory with accusations that are, after all, not that significant to his real achievements? More generally, if we like someone, we are prone to explain and excuse copying, so we don’t have to admit we were fooled into thinking the person was better than he really was. It’s almost as if the stigma of plagiarism gets attached to the person who discovers it.
Randall also refers to defenses of “plagiarism” by a black Franco-African writer as an act of revenge against colonialism, a reappropriation that does to dominant texts what has been done to colonized peoples. In the older materials she studies, some people refer to plagiarism as conquest - but conquest has not always “been seen in the same ethical light, and it is certainly not seen in the same way by victors and vanquished.” Thus, in the 16th/17th-century materials she investigates, imitation and translation of foreign cultural materials is sometimes celebrated, while imitation of nationals is condemned as plagiarism. Cross-cultural appropriation enriches the borrower’s cultural storehouse, while in-culture borrowing just redistributes wealth. Thus, Dryden wrote, “If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out the treasure of the nation, which is never to return, but what I bring from Italy, I spend in England: here it remains.” This coincides with the economic mercantilism of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which colonization operated centripetally, with wealth drawn from the colonies to the center. The next two centuries were more centrifugal, with the focus shifting to transforming the foreign nations by conquest into new versions of the old. Transformation and appropriation, under that model, entails not just conquest but making over the conqueror in the image of the conquered, like the Romans and the Greeks. (The old mercantilism remained in place in literary property even after Adam Smith had kicked it out of economics, though - reciprocal copyright protection for foreign works wasn’t available in most countries until the late 19th century.) Another kind of mercantilism was at work in the celebration of original versus borrowed knowledge more generally - as Edward Young wrote in the eighteenth century, “vegetable growth” and “native growth” versus “mechanical assembly” and “borrowed riches [from abroad that] make us poor” - a sort of individualized mercantilism of the mind.
Other consequences of colonization and cultural mingling affected our ideas about authorship and originality, too. As colonization became a dirty word, “authenticity” became more valued. But only a particular kind of authenticity: the creation of a national literary tradition from oral and folkloric culture. Randall points out the irony that the new (old?) works were often in the colonizer’s language. Nobody seemed to notice that the novel was not an African art form, that an African novel is already an example of postmodern, cross-cultural collage. Where is authenticity then? And is an authentic African author allowed to use non-African works as a springboard for his/her own work, as Ouologuem did? This reminds me of Tori Amos’s cover album Strange Little Girls, which consists of songs by men about women. Tori insisted that she had to use those songs so that she could speak to men - that her own words wouldn’t have been as good at telling the truth about what women hear when men speak.
Randall draws other insights from contrasting current ideas about plagiarism to older ones. As she points out, the existence of plagiarism accusations throughout written history casts doubt on the claim that the “author” is a modern construction, though the definition/attributes of that person have changed a lot over time. The premodern idea of creation was that it came from the public domain, where ideas naturally and eternally exist, and individuals were incapable of appropriating them. The Romantic/modern conception is the opposite: the origin of ideas is within the individual, though they eventually enter the public domain. Randall suggests that Lockean theory helped in this transition by placing property rights derived from labor at the heart of the definition of originality. Tracing the evolution of the author-idea also explains how premodern ideas of authority - that art was not invented, not original in the modern sense, but discovered/inherited/transmitted from the past - were transmuted into the idea of the author as a person who repudiated what had gone before. If the premodern idea of true genius was a person who could work a good variation on a twice-told tale, that celebration of small differences is only a few steps away from a celebration of larger differences.
The book ends with a discussion of contemporary artists who consciously use copying and appropriation to make their art, people like Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine, known for doing things like taking photographs of photographs. Acker and Levine are feminist artists, and Randall contrasts them with the post-colonialist writers she discussed earlier, suggesting that the feminists are on the inside of postmodernism and therefore have received a better critical reception, and that this also accounts for the covertness of the post-colonialists’ copying and the openness of the feminists’ copying - the feminists, she thinks, have more power and can afford to be more overt; the post-colonized must resort to guerrilla tactics. I’m not sure the causation flows that way - when the copying is overt, criticis judge that as part of (or as the whole of) the artistic merits of a work, whereas covert copying invites critics to judge the work not so much as part of a dialogue with earlier works. If the post-colonial writers had chosen to do the same thing, for example copying Rudyard Kipling and claiming authorship of his stories, I imagine the critical reception would have been more like the reception that Levine received.
These days, Acker and Levine and their ilk face not only artistic disapproval of their copying but potential copyright infringement lawsuits. Although the legal academy generally thinks that appropriation artists should have viable fair use defenses, the courts have not been so kind, especially to celebrity artist/copyist Jeff Koons, who’s lost several very expensive copyright cases. Koons, like Andy Warhol before him, is a publicity hound; he wants controversy, so the lawsuits were probably worth it to him. Randall points out the irony inherent in the legal defense of appropriation art as an expression of a political/artistic vision - that defense depends on a strong author theory, valorizing the creativity/free expression of the appropriator. When we call Sherrie Levine an author because her photos have a message for us, we are in a way rejecting her critique of originality. This is why, in my current writing about the value of copying, I haven’t been interested in defending appropriation art - it’s all about adding a new message to the old art, a message conveyed by copying. I’m interested in the value of copies that aren’t critical of the originals.
Fritz Gutbrodt, Joint Ventures: Authorship, Translation, Plagiarism: Another highly academic foray into the strange waters of authorship, originality and authority, focusing on certain 18th-century perspectives with some contrast provided by contemporary criticism. Early on, Gutbrodt suggests that “originality is a blemish that mars the perfection of a faithful copy. For while in counterfeits every mark of imperfection reproduces something that is already present in the original and thus makes that blemish an integral part of the work copied, any defect in an original work constitutes a fragmentation of the integrity of ideal beauty.” Gutbrodt takes William Gaddis, whose novel A Frolic of His Own I found myself unable to finish despite the fact that it was about law and plagiarism, as one of his source texts for discussing plagiarism. He ties a car accident in the narrative - caused by a car that had no driver - to copying, suggesting that a plagiarist is in some sense not “in the driver’s seat” of his own text, lacking full power over it. “He is at once author and reader ... owner and thief,” unable to draw the line between the two positions.
Why did originality become the standard for art? Gutbrodt suggests that, as the printing press enabled books to replace memory, a poet’s ability to memorize and recite became less important; invention and originality were the mark of an artist, the only thing that a living being could do better than a page. He also discusses 18th-century literary theory that saw all art as imitation: imitation of nature or imitation of authors. Only the former could be “original” in the sense of a unique work of genius expressing a perception of the world surrounding the artist. There was a debate about modern versus ancient authors, with some people arguing that the ancients were merely accidental originals, whose antecedents/borrowings were lost in the mists of time, putting moderns at an apparent disadvantage in originality. Others claimed that moderns had the choice of whether to be original or to imitate, whereas the ancients didn’t, thereby increasing the merit of original moderns. (These points create interesting resonances with the argument, which Gutbrodt does not discuss, that in a world in which one’s experience is permeated with preexisting works, one must be free to imitate and borrow from them if one is to have the same degree of freedom as artists did in less textually saturated times.)
Gutbrodt offers biting criticism of Internet pundits for their nostalgia for a monastic/feudal society with no copyright where every reader can write glosses into a text - he finds it “almost cute” how monks in medieval scriptoria are “transmogrified into students sitting down in a computer lab to write up their lecture notes for a seminar paper they have to hand in.” As he points out, medieval societies exercised very tight control over writing; it wasn’t a free for all. Moreover, the idea of the reader freed by hypertext to participate in writing may reinscribe the Romantic notion of authorship, just giving the reader that cachet of total freedom and coherent identity. At the same time, Gutbrodt thinks that electronic media do change our ideas of authorship, in that author and reader both become “users” in a network.
One big problem with this book is that Gutbrodt rarely makes clear whose beliefs are whose, a serious defect when one is discussing the nested Russian dolls of what critic X thought of critic Y’s take on Baudelaire’s take on Poe. “Genius” is the subject of many more sentences than actual people. And when people do show up, the text is often so distant that it might not exist at all: “Derrida is certainly right in conjecturing that Marie Bonaparte’s footnote on Baudelaire’s mistranslation of a passage [in Poe] ... plays in important part in Lacan’s reading of the text.” The prose also seems to glory in a proliferation of contradictions and wordplay at the expense of meaning. Yes, calling Baudelaire’s translation of Poe “Poedelaire” is nifty, but am I really supposed to believe that Baudelaire eliminated Dupin’s Christian names from his translation of “The Purloined Letter” because Dupin’s initials were alphabetically prior to Baudelaire’s, A versus C? Or that it’s significant that Coleridge used “clay” in his translation of Schlegel because “clay” shares letters with Coleridge’s name? My irritation, however, may simply be one of the perils of reading outside my genres - if I were approaching the book in a more playful spirit, I might enjoy the word games more.
Christian Moraru, Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Culture in the Age of Cloning: Maybe literary theory fatigue had set in by the time I got to this, but I found it almost unreadable. (It also didn’t help that I’m unfamiliar with a lot of Moraru’s sources, like Doctorow, Mark Leyner and Kathy Acker.) I think Moraru’s basic argument is that postmodern rewriting is not empty and unproductive, as some critics would have it, but that it can be political and generate new meaning from old texts. The one insight I liked was that there are two types of rewriting: the classical idea of imitating the greats to learn from them (more familiar to us in visual art) and the more pomo idea of rewriting the greats to expose the ways in which they were blind to race/gender/class etc. - apprenticeship versus breaking with tradition. As Z. pointed out to me, these are not exclusive; one could imitate the greats in order to do it better than they did, and think that part of doing it better was to be politically aware. Moraru says he’s distinguishing between general “there’s nothing new under the sun” postmodernism as a sort of generic rewriting and more conscious, deliberate imitation of particular texts, but then he also says that The Handmaid’s Tale rewrites The Scarlet Letter, which seems like a stretch - there’s a relationship, no doubt, but I wouldn’t call it imitative. Anyhow, I had a strong desire to strangle the author after repeated assault by single words in quotation marks - one paragraph (one!) produced the following: “totalizing,” “oversystemization,” “polemical,” “innovative,” “revealing,” and “unrevisionist.” These weren’t good words before they were put in scare quotes.
Marilyn Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power: This is a study whose thesis is that plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder. This is true on several levels: If I talk about the “ghost in the machine,” a certain set of people will recognize that this is allusion, and give me credit for knowledge. Other people won’t recognize the reference and may give me credit for rhetoric. It’s only in the latter case - and maybe only if I have deliberately tried to reach audience-2 - that we speak about plagiarism. (Wonderful, fortuitous example here, where the author of the very funny Movies in 15 Minutes journal roundly condemns plagiarism, defined as reprinting without proper credit, even with word changes, then says, “Do not post it in a box, do not post it on a fox. I do not like creative theft and ham, I do not like it, Jerk I Am,” then follows that with a note saying, “Don't [accuse me of plagiarism] --you know damn well what this is from.”)
More broadly, whether we see something as plagiarism (to be condemned) or standing on the shoulders of giants (to be lauded) depends on what we think of the plagiarist/author. Thus, a contemporary defended Ben Jonson: “What would be theft in other poets, is onely victory in him.” Randall focuses on literary plagiarism rather than scientific, journalistic, or student plagiarism, because she thinks that, unlike these other types, literary plagiarism is not just contested in definition but contested in value - a literary plagiarist will not be condemned if s/he produces a work of genius as a result, like Nabokov’s Lolita. By contrast, there is no history of considering certain types of student plagiarism to be genius or to transcend their copying and become something more worthy (of course, plagiarizing from enough sources can cross the line into research). She dissects plagiarism into its component parts, which involve theft (taking another’s work) and fraud (taking unearned credit). There’s a lot of jargon, but some interesting points, like how we currently judge and psychoanalyze the plagiarist and not the plagiarized text but do the opposite with real authors, who disappear into their texts.
With plagiarism, we are always concerned about intent, as we are with fraud. But how do we tell intent? Sometimes we infer it from the silence of the text as to source. This means that the reader’s (initial?) failure to recognize gets projected as the writer’s deviousness; the reader’s erudition may affect her judgment of the author’s intentions. (The infamous debates over Cassie Claire’s Draco series provide a good fannish example - if you knew Buffy, you couldn’t help but recognize some of the lines as borrowed from that show - they were pretty distinctive lines - and I certainly thought it was implausible that she was attempting to disguise her debts. But I was unfamiliar with some of her other source texts, so I couldn’t readily tell when the snappy patter came more directly from somebody else.) In a sense, then, “overt plagiarism” is an oxymoron.
In the wider world, people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have been accused of plagiarism or, at least, failing to credit sources in accordance with the norms of their professions. Randall makes the point that the “plagiarisms” of King and of another fellow by the name of Ouologuem, initially touted as a major African writer, have been treated not as individual or idiosyncratic failings, as the plagiarisms of white guys usually are, but as representative of some cultural or political clash. Was King copying involuntarily, because he had accepted the master’s value system? Was he copying deliberately, contemptuously? Was copying part of a particularly African-American aesthetic? A lot of these social/political theories render King’s professors either incompetent for failing to recognize the copying or reverse racists for letting him get away with it. Whether they fob blame on someone else or claim that nothing blameworthy occurred, the number of King-defenders far exceeds the number of his detractors. As Randall notes, plagiarism-hounds are unpopular, especially if they only make hue and cry after someone’s reputation is established. King did many other, more important things; why tarnish his memory with accusations that are, after all, not that significant to his real achievements? More generally, if we like someone, we are prone to explain and excuse copying, so we don’t have to admit we were fooled into thinking the person was better than he really was. It’s almost as if the stigma of plagiarism gets attached to the person who discovers it.
Randall also refers to defenses of “plagiarism” by a black Franco-African writer as an act of revenge against colonialism, a reappropriation that does to dominant texts what has been done to colonized peoples. In the older materials she studies, some people refer to plagiarism as conquest - but conquest has not always “been seen in the same ethical light, and it is certainly not seen in the same way by victors and vanquished.” Thus, in the 16th/17th-century materials she investigates, imitation and translation of foreign cultural materials is sometimes celebrated, while imitation of nationals is condemned as plagiarism. Cross-cultural appropriation enriches the borrower’s cultural storehouse, while in-culture borrowing just redistributes wealth. Thus, Dryden wrote, “If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out the treasure of the nation, which is never to return, but what I bring from Italy, I spend in England: here it remains.” This coincides with the economic mercantilism of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which colonization operated centripetally, with wealth drawn from the colonies to the center. The next two centuries were more centrifugal, with the focus shifting to transforming the foreign nations by conquest into new versions of the old. Transformation and appropriation, under that model, entails not just conquest but making over the conqueror in the image of the conquered, like the Romans and the Greeks. (The old mercantilism remained in place in literary property even after Adam Smith had kicked it out of economics, though - reciprocal copyright protection for foreign works wasn’t available in most countries until the late 19th century.) Another kind of mercantilism was at work in the celebration of original versus borrowed knowledge more generally - as Edward Young wrote in the eighteenth century, “vegetable growth” and “native growth” versus “mechanical assembly” and “borrowed riches [from abroad that] make us poor” - a sort of individualized mercantilism of the mind.
Other consequences of colonization and cultural mingling affected our ideas about authorship and originality, too. As colonization became a dirty word, “authenticity” became more valued. But only a particular kind of authenticity: the creation of a national literary tradition from oral and folkloric culture. Randall points out the irony that the new (old?) works were often in the colonizer’s language. Nobody seemed to notice that the novel was not an African art form, that an African novel is already an example of postmodern, cross-cultural collage. Where is authenticity then? And is an authentic African author allowed to use non-African works as a springboard for his/her own work, as Ouologuem did? This reminds me of Tori Amos’s cover album Strange Little Girls, which consists of songs by men about women. Tori insisted that she had to use those songs so that she could speak to men - that her own words wouldn’t have been as good at telling the truth about what women hear when men speak.
Randall draws other insights from contrasting current ideas about plagiarism to older ones. As she points out, the existence of plagiarism accusations throughout written history casts doubt on the claim that the “author” is a modern construction, though the definition/attributes of that person have changed a lot over time. The premodern idea of creation was that it came from the public domain, where ideas naturally and eternally exist, and individuals were incapable of appropriating them. The Romantic/modern conception is the opposite: the origin of ideas is within the individual, though they eventually enter the public domain. Randall suggests that Lockean theory helped in this transition by placing property rights derived from labor at the heart of the definition of originality. Tracing the evolution of the author-idea also explains how premodern ideas of authority - that art was not invented, not original in the modern sense, but discovered/inherited/transmitted from the past - were transmuted into the idea of the author as a person who repudiated what had gone before. If the premodern idea of true genius was a person who could work a good variation on a twice-told tale, that celebration of small differences is only a few steps away from a celebration of larger differences.
The book ends with a discussion of contemporary artists who consciously use copying and appropriation to make their art, people like Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine, known for doing things like taking photographs of photographs. Acker and Levine are feminist artists, and Randall contrasts them with the post-colonialist writers she discussed earlier, suggesting that the feminists are on the inside of postmodernism and therefore have received a better critical reception, and that this also accounts for the covertness of the post-colonialists’ copying and the openness of the feminists’ copying - the feminists, she thinks, have more power and can afford to be more overt; the post-colonized must resort to guerrilla tactics. I’m not sure the causation flows that way - when the copying is overt, criticis judge that as part of (or as the whole of) the artistic merits of a work, whereas covert copying invites critics to judge the work not so much as part of a dialogue with earlier works. If the post-colonial writers had chosen to do the same thing, for example copying Rudyard Kipling and claiming authorship of his stories, I imagine the critical reception would have been more like the reception that Levine received.
These days, Acker and Levine and their ilk face not only artistic disapproval of their copying but potential copyright infringement lawsuits. Although the legal academy generally thinks that appropriation artists should have viable fair use defenses, the courts have not been so kind, especially to celebrity artist/copyist Jeff Koons, who’s lost several very expensive copyright cases. Koons, like Andy Warhol before him, is a publicity hound; he wants controversy, so the lawsuits were probably worth it to him. Randall points out the irony inherent in the legal defense of appropriation art as an expression of a political/artistic vision - that defense depends on a strong author theory, valorizing the creativity/free expression of the appropriator. When we call Sherrie Levine an author because her photos have a message for us, we are in a way rejecting her critique of originality. This is why, in my current writing about the value of copying, I haven’t been interested in defending appropriation art - it’s all about adding a new message to the old art, a message conveyed by copying. I’m interested in the value of copies that aren’t critical of the originals.
Fritz Gutbrodt, Joint Ventures: Authorship, Translation, Plagiarism: Another highly academic foray into the strange waters of authorship, originality and authority, focusing on certain 18th-century perspectives with some contrast provided by contemporary criticism. Early on, Gutbrodt suggests that “originality is a blemish that mars the perfection of a faithful copy. For while in counterfeits every mark of imperfection reproduces something that is already present in the original and thus makes that blemish an integral part of the work copied, any defect in an original work constitutes a fragmentation of the integrity of ideal beauty.” Gutbrodt takes William Gaddis, whose novel A Frolic of His Own I found myself unable to finish despite the fact that it was about law and plagiarism, as one of his source texts for discussing plagiarism. He ties a car accident in the narrative - caused by a car that had no driver - to copying, suggesting that a plagiarist is in some sense not “in the driver’s seat” of his own text, lacking full power over it. “He is at once author and reader ... owner and thief,” unable to draw the line between the two positions.
Why did originality become the standard for art? Gutbrodt suggests that, as the printing press enabled books to replace memory, a poet’s ability to memorize and recite became less important; invention and originality were the mark of an artist, the only thing that a living being could do better than a page. He also discusses 18th-century literary theory that saw all art as imitation: imitation of nature or imitation of authors. Only the former could be “original” in the sense of a unique work of genius expressing a perception of the world surrounding the artist. There was a debate about modern versus ancient authors, with some people arguing that the ancients were merely accidental originals, whose antecedents/borrowings were lost in the mists of time, putting moderns at an apparent disadvantage in originality. Others claimed that moderns had the choice of whether to be original or to imitate, whereas the ancients didn’t, thereby increasing the merit of original moderns. (These points create interesting resonances with the argument, which Gutbrodt does not discuss, that in a world in which one’s experience is permeated with preexisting works, one must be free to imitate and borrow from them if one is to have the same degree of freedom as artists did in less textually saturated times.)
Gutbrodt offers biting criticism of Internet pundits for their nostalgia for a monastic/feudal society with no copyright where every reader can write glosses into a text - he finds it “almost cute” how monks in medieval scriptoria are “transmogrified into students sitting down in a computer lab to write up their lecture notes for a seminar paper they have to hand in.” As he points out, medieval societies exercised very tight control over writing; it wasn’t a free for all. Moreover, the idea of the reader freed by hypertext to participate in writing may reinscribe the Romantic notion of authorship, just giving the reader that cachet of total freedom and coherent identity. At the same time, Gutbrodt thinks that electronic media do change our ideas of authorship, in that author and reader both become “users” in a network.
One big problem with this book is that Gutbrodt rarely makes clear whose beliefs are whose, a serious defect when one is discussing the nested Russian dolls of what critic X thought of critic Y’s take on Baudelaire’s take on Poe. “Genius” is the subject of many more sentences than actual people. And when people do show up, the text is often so distant that it might not exist at all: “Derrida is certainly right in conjecturing that Marie Bonaparte’s footnote on Baudelaire’s mistranslation of a passage [in Poe] ... plays in important part in Lacan’s reading of the text.” The prose also seems to glory in a proliferation of contradictions and wordplay at the expense of meaning. Yes, calling Baudelaire’s translation of Poe “Poedelaire” is nifty, but am I really supposed to believe that Baudelaire eliminated Dupin’s Christian names from his translation of “The Purloined Letter” because Dupin’s initials were alphabetically prior to Baudelaire’s, A versus C? Or that it’s significant that Coleridge used “clay” in his translation of Schlegel because “clay” shares letters with Coleridge’s name? My irritation, however, may simply be one of the perils of reading outside my genres - if I were approaching the book in a more playful spirit, I might enjoy the word games more.
Christian Moraru, Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Culture in the Age of Cloning: Maybe literary theory fatigue had set in by the time I got to this, but I found it almost unreadable. (It also didn’t help that I’m unfamiliar with a lot of Moraru’s sources, like Doctorow, Mark Leyner and Kathy Acker.) I think Moraru’s basic argument is that postmodern rewriting is not empty and unproductive, as some critics would have it, but that it can be political and generate new meaning from old texts. The one insight I liked was that there are two types of rewriting: the classical idea of imitating the greats to learn from them (more familiar to us in visual art) and the more pomo idea of rewriting the greats to expose the ways in which they were blind to race/gender/class etc. - apprenticeship versus breaking with tradition. As Z. pointed out to me, these are not exclusive; one could imitate the greats in order to do it better than they did, and think that part of doing it better was to be politically aware. Moraru says he’s distinguishing between general “there’s nothing new under the sun” postmodernism as a sort of generic rewriting and more conscious, deliberate imitation of particular texts, but then he also says that The Handmaid’s Tale rewrites The Scarlet Letter, which seems like a stretch - there’s a relationship, no doubt, but I wouldn’t call it imitative. Anyhow, I had a strong desire to strangle the author after repeated assault by single words in quotation marks - one paragraph (one!) produced the following: “totalizing,” “oversystemization,” “polemical,” “innovative,” “revealing,” and “unrevisionist.” These weren’t good words before they were put in scare quotes.