- At February 14, 2007
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Navigate, plagiarism, pop culture
4
Well, it’s the week of reviews getting published for me! My review of Rebecca Loudon’s chapbook with No Tell Books, Navigate, is up at Galatea Ressurects:
http://galatearesurrection5.blogspot.com/2007/02/navigate-amelia-earharts-letters-home.html
A very interesting article in Harper’s about our current society’s hysterical preoccupation with “plagiarism” and copyright:
http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html
The author, a novelist, brings up quite a few good points. Today, TS Eliot, Shakespeare, and Nobokov would be shamed and bullied by professors and publishers into eliminating their quotes, allusions, and borrowing, ultimately creating lesser works of art because of the anxiety towards contamination!
This really honks me off. The way you see the world is unique, although you may be contaminated by the same art, culture. Why not include your entire world, contaminated and all that it is?
Coca-cola and Tide are ubiquitous, so we must pretend they do not exist! Pop culture references keep your work from being timeless – or make it frivolous! I’ve heard these arguments so many times, and I believe they are all BS.
Update: Justin Evans makes a good point in the comment box – of course I don’t mean to discount problems with actual plagiarism as practived by students who copy whole encyclopedia entries into thier papers without references – I was referring to a hysteria around creative allusions and enframing and collage and other tecniques that have been around since before Modernism.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
David Vincenti
This is where I think a background in technical writing is an asset – being trained to recognize the value in the references while positing our own hypotheses. Yes, plagiarism exists, but it gets peer-ejected quite quickly.
I also think technical writing, properly harnessed, helps a poet tend toward specificity and away from the abstract, but that’s another issue entirely
Justin Evans
I would not be so bold as to classify my problems with plagiarism as hysteria, but then, when I think of plagiarism, I do not think of Nabokov, Eliot, or cryptomnesia—I relate to my experience with students and assigned critical essays.
I know we are talking apples and oranges in some regards, but when a student hands in a paper wholly, or in part, cut and pasted from an essay provided by Schoolsucks (dot) com and expects full credit, plagiarism is not quite the blurred line as implied by the likes of Shakespeare or others taking plot lines and using stock characters to create a drama.
I am especially peeved at the concept of plagiarism because when I taught English I encouraged the use of quotes and summarization from other writers to help establish a point or to support a hypothesis.
I see where you are going, but distinctions should be made lest people try to argue the wholesale theft of written texts with what some poets and authors do with their artistic efforts.
Peter
“You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?”
Thanks for this article. Loved it!
xop
Sam of the ten thousand things
tag
Great review by the way.