Attributing a quote in dialogue

[Madame Manga]

You have set down a passage of talk in a story, and one of your characters uses a line first written by someone other than you. The line might be something like "This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship," or "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" or "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

Would you attribute this line in any way? If so, how? Is it insufferably pedantic to insist on footnoting a phrase that the large majority of American-pop-culture-conversant readers would instantly recognize in any context and (presumably) assume that only a moron or naif would have meant to claim it as original?

What if this line is a little less well known than the examples I have given, but still recognized by movie buffs? What if it was paraphrased slightly to fit the circumstances? Is this to be regarded as a means of theft, or as a natural way of assimilating diverse cultural influences into a realistic work of fiction?

I can't see requiring a attribution for a quoted or paraphrased line from the Bible no matter how obscure, nor from Shakespeare, nor from a Victorian poet, unless it was quoted as a colophon and not as an organic part of the text. When is a note not superfluous? Does copyright status matter, or the cultural cachet of the original? For instance, I think a line from a living poet might deserve an attribution, but not a line from a television reality show. Do you need to track down the original screenwriter's name when you throw in a tidbit of semi-modern movie quotation?

MM

 

[KillerMuffin]

It depends on where the line comes from and how its used. For Lit's purposes, using pop culture lines aren't really going to get you into trouble.

If you want to, you can put a small note at the end attributing the quote. Such as: If you haven't seen the movie "Cool Hand Luke" that's where I got the line "What we have hee-ah is a failyuh to communcate." That might help your ethical problems Typically, in written publications, the sources are cited at the beginning during the acknowledgements or foreward. The prose itself isn't footnoted, however.

 

[A7inchPhildo]

I may be a bit off, but if you are quoting a person, who is quoting a famous quote and you are not infringing on a copywrite or trademark. Then it would be up to the consumer to figure out the origin of the quote. If you deliberately steal a title from a quote then you need to give attribution. Most likely also need consent.
In either case to post at Lit you most likely will not be charged for royalties. If it is to publish for sale consult an attorney.

Phil

 

[Madame Manga]

Thank you, KM--no, I don't imagine that Lit even provides for genuine footnoting, since we aren't exactly doing research papers here. What I think I'm trying to avoid is anything that throws the borrowed phrase into undue prominence, so an end note is probably the best idea. I'm also trying to avoid a disease peculiar to fan fiction writers: commenting on every reference to the source material to make sure that your reader genuflects to your infinite knowledge. Blech. ;-)

I suppose that something that's been around for many years, is still popular and has truly entered the language--Casablanca probably qualifies on all counts--needs less attribution than, say, a Jimmy Cagney movie from 1935 that isn't even out on video.

I may be relying on urban legend here, but I think I've heard that titles are specifically exempt from copyright--i.e., you can't claim ownership of a word or short phrase. That would mean I can title a dirty story "The Road Not Taken" or "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" without consulting Robert Frost's estate or Maya Angelou's agent. I could be wrong.

MM

 

[KillerMuffin]

Titles are exempt from copyright, but not trademark. Most titles are not trademarked though you might find "star wars" trademarked or something.

Using lyrics in a work is the most legally troublesome. Lyric writers have freaking legal fits about them to the extent that most authors just don't use lyrics if they don't have to. It's not worth the effort to set the tone.

Using poetry in a work can be legally troubling as well. The reason why is that if you use a single line from a ten line poem, you are using 10% of the artist's work and they want compensation accordingly. Using a line from another novel or a drama is usually not going to get you in trouble or a problem--after all ten words out of 75,000? Who cares.

Famous lines that have become cliche--such as "Play it again, Sam," are in a realm all their own, copyright speaking. They are copyright protected because someone did write them. However, enforcing that copyright? Is it worth the effort? No.

 

[Jan_Comenius]

attributions

This is an interesting one. If I understand this correctly, Madame Manga seems far more interested in seeking out a standard of opinion rather than an legal/scholarly answer to the question of attribution.

Back in the last century, when I lived in the real world, I remember the MLA Handbook had a small, brand-new section on web citations. I suspect that by now a miniature little world of scholarly standards has grown up around the issue. There may even be a few overpriced professional journals out there further stretching research library budgets.

But the question as it has been posed here deals far more with judgements of taste rather than propriety. It asks us to confront the strengths and limitations of web-published fiction as a new form of literary exploration. Viewed as such, the situation is not without obvious historical parallels.

I remember reading Tom Jones for the first time and being amazed by the amount of Latin quoted throughout the book. I had picked the book up at a library fire sale and it was an orphan from a larger series of generic "Great Books On The Cheap." As such, it lacked any scholarly annotations whatsoever, and posed a serious challenge to a guy like me, who had only grudgingly sat through four years of high-school Spanish and understood basic demotic Greek only with difficulty.

The amazingly clannish nature of the English novel in its original literary form was hammered home to me during the week that I struggled through that beast of a book. I was acutely aware that this novel was not addressed to my culture and my time, in that it simply was unaware the possibility that someone could consider higher education to be a number of elective courses built around loosely defined general education requirements for "literacy." Every person reading Tom Jones when it was originally published was expected to understand Latin and a little bit of Greek, and if they didn't, well...welcome to the big stiffy.

There are Joyceans at major English departments who get together and savor the wealth of cultural referents in Finnegans Wake with all the intensity of your basic cult worshipper. They sit around in grad student apartments, pounding down middlebrow wine and slivers of the specialty cheese of the week, running through resources and searching for the secrets of the universe somewhere within the Work in Progress. To attend one of these gatherings is to undergo something akin to Tom Cruise's experiences in Eyes Wide Shut.

In these times of moral relativism and a general attitude of acceptance toward inclusion as a moral dictate, it seems obvious that we are heading toward a new sort of standard for such things as attributive transparency. It seems to be the fairest course in a bigoted, chauvinist, racist and class-segregated world. But something tells me that it will be a dark day for literature if the inherent paranoid exchange that names writing and reading is forced to succumb to the dogma of rote egality, especially in a genre as ephemeral as that of web-published fiction.

 

[A7inchPhildo]

Thank you, KillerMuffin, Jan_Comenius, Madame Manga

That is why I come here to learn a bit each day. Not that I am publishing a book, but I like to know.

Thank you, Phil

 

[snooper]

In my books I do one of two things: either I put a note at the top, eg,

The poem in Chapter 17 is from "Childhood" by Ruth Pitter.

OR I say something like:

"Taken from the county jail, by a set of curious chances ..." she quoted.

If it is unlikely that the readers will recognise the quote then I might have:

"Taken from the county jail, by a set of curious chances ..." she quoted, "I do love Gilbert and Sullivan, don't you?".