Going for the plug. Humour and theft.

[gauchecritic]

In my Hallowe'en contest entry Fairy Story I stole both directly and obscurely from at least 5 different sources (prizes for listing each and every one) in order to be both funny and apparently clever.

Whether it worked is open to debate, but it made me wonder: can an author steal legitimately under circumstances other than humour?

Gauche

 

[Guest]

Answer to your question: Yes. Do you want specifics?

I know all five sources but I'll leave the prize for another lucky lass.

Perdita

 

[MathGirl]

Petit theft

can an author steal legitimately under circumstances other than humour?

Dear Gauchie,
You politely asked me if you could use my one sentence of deathless prose. That ain't theft. I was flattered (and astonished) that you would want it.
MG

 

[Guest]

The first case of literary borrowing

Had this in a remote file:
- - - - - - - -
CHAPTER 23: Tales of Gilgamesh—THE FIRST CASE OF LITERARY BORROWING

GEORGE SMITH, an Englishman who had been studying the thousands of clay tablets and fragments brought to the British Museum from the mounds covering ancient Nineveh, read a paper, on December 3, 1862, before the then recently organized Society of Biblical Archaeology. His paper proved to be a milestone for Biblical studies, particularly in their comparative aspects.

In this paper Smith announced that, on one of the clay tablets dug up from the long-buried library of King Ashurbanipal, who reigned in the seventh century B.C., he had discovered and deciphered a version of the deluge myth which showed marked resemblances to the flood story in the Book of Genesis. The announcement caused no small sensation in scholarly circles and even aroused the enthusiasm of the general public the world over. …

Not long after he had announced the discovery of the Babylonian flood story, Smith realized, on further study of the tablets and fragments from the Ashurbanipal library, that this deluge myth formed but a small part of a long poem, and that the ancient Babylonians themselves referred to it as the "Gilgamesh”…

From: History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Man's Recorded History; Samuel Noah Kramer; U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

 

[gauchecritic]

Re: Petit theft

You politely asked me if you could use my one sentence of deathless prose. That ain't theft. I was flattered (and astonished) that you would want it.
MG

Ah but I took your perfectly serious sentence and made mockery of it in 2 ways. 1) by context. 2) by addition and 3) by attribution.. in 3 ways. 1) by context... I'll come in again.

Gauche

(No prizes for that)

Perdita: I said from at least 5. hehe.

 

[Guest]

Serious (but not too) reply.

Gauche, you call it stealing but in your case it's not (except perhaps for any of the references, allusions, etc. I did not get, hahaha). In creative writing, or literature (pardon me), it's called borrowing but even that is not a perfect term. Great writers have 'borrowed' from others since writing became an art. The genre does not matter, and there are authors fine enough to borrow from themselves. Just a few examples:

Primo: Shakespeare - from the Greeks, Romans (Ovid esp.), Chaucer, the York mystery cycle, and histories such as Plutarch, Holinshed, and the Mirror for Magistrates. (And he is in turn borrowed from more than any other author.)

Secundo: James Joyce - just about everyone ('Here Comes Everybody' is the title of a text on The Wake, plus makes up an acronym in the book), but most well known: Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Homer. (And he is in turn borrowed from more than any other author except Sh're.)

Not necessarily tercero: T.S. Eliot ("The Wasteland").

Thing is, when done consciously or deliberately the best writers make the borrowings their own, "make it new", in Ezra Pound's words (who was also a fine borrower). Otherwise they come close to real stealing, i.e., plagiarism.

OK, ducks? Perdita

p.s. Same goes in music - Beethoven and Wagner were the greatest borrowers in my mind.

 

[Guest]

Gauche, I'm hoping you're one AH person who will not label me for knowing this stuff and caring about it. However, to give credit where due, what I am posting here I just learned via conversation w/a friend who earns a living by knowing this stuff (is that subtle enough?)

S.T. Coleridge was a veritable plagiarist, though he rationalized it in his inimitable fashion and even wrote about it, his ratonale. It has been unarguably shown that the bulk of his Shakepearean criticism was lifted from Shlegel, also much of his famed Bio. Lit.

Keats' poetry changed remarkably after he read Shakespeare. He does not attribute. There are 72 Shakespeareanisms in his "Ode to a Nightengale".

Nearly all of Jane Austen's plots are taken from Frances 'Fanny' Burney's plots or episodes. One may also say all of Austen's plots are Miltonic, i.e., "He also serves who only stands and waits".

I have one more item but my friend is going to write an essay on it in order to improve her chances for a salary increase so I will keep it to myself lest a Lit. author 'borrow' her idea.

in the spirit of proletarianism, Perdita