ON PLAGIARISM
" To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research"
T.S.Eliott.
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. T.S. Eliot.
************************************************************************************
The recent legal donnybrook of trans - Atlantic proportions between Dan Brown (American)author of "Da Vinci Code" and Michael Baigent ( British), author of, "The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail"(in the U.S.it is called,"Holy Blood, Holy Grail") moved the soul searching subject - plagiarism - which has been for almost ever on slow boil, to the front burner.
The British judge Peter Smith, after tortuous months of hearings,of charges and denials during which by his own admission he was tempted to run away from the avalanche of reading material thrown at him. Remember : White wigs and black robes do not a wise man make.
Dan Brown admitted to being inspired by his reading of " Holy Blood, Holy Grail" but rejected outright the charge of stealing. Judgment was in favor of American Dan Brown author of, " Da Vinci Code". As if though this was not enough a nondescript curator of the Moscow museum is making similar accusations.
There is a bottom line to all this. Both books have received publicity many fold more than the costs of litigation. The two books have gone into accelerated reprints.
It is in the light of the Brown - Baigent legal brouhaha that the following excerpts, quotations - some attributed, some not though authentic should be viewed.
" Swinburne stole from Keats and Brahms used a theme from Beethoven's Ninth for his First Symphony."
" We all work off each other" E.L.Doctorow, author of, " Ragtime"
" The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something as if it had never been said before." Johann Wolfgang Von
The title, " Gone with the wind" comes from an Ernest Dowson Goethe poem.
The title of Ken Kesey's popular novel, " One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" was lifted from the children's folklore: "...one flew East, One flew West, One flew over the Cuckoo's nest"
" They fake each other's literary wash"
" Once the poet lets go of his poem, it is no longer his. It belongs to any one who wants it, It's a gift" Stanley Kunitz.
" Well stolen is half written"
" Writers are readers moved to emulation."
" Shakespeare like Puccini was a notorious poacher"
Lorrie Moore, professor of English, University of Wisconsin.
" Words make their way in the world without a master, and any one with little cleverness can appropriate them." Deepak Chopra.
Cleverness is what Kaavya Viswanathan,the nineteen year old Harvard sophomore was found to be wanting. For her novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild And Got a Life" for which she is reported to have received an advance of $500,000.00, she had lifted passages into to from Megan Mc.Cafferty's novels, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings" and also from Sophie Kinsella's, "Can You Keep A Secret"
Her defense - the copying was " Unconscious and Unintentional" cuts no ice. It did not pass muster either with the publishers or the public. It is indeed sad that at such a young age she should get a black eye. Egg all over her face.
You have not heard it all. Kaavya Viswanathan's infractions are small potatoes, sophomoric blunders at worst compared to what " author " John Kenney bragged to Larry King. He admitted copying F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and from Dellilo's "White Noise" and is busy copying Jonathan Franzen's "Corrections"
Larry King: " Exact same, in the exact same order?"
John Kenney: "Identical"
Larry King: "Legal problems? Moral problems?"
John Kenney: "Not exactly. My agent and publisher are behind it 100%."
There is some more.
Here is what author Tom Wolfe who needs no introduction says in his book, " In Our Time."
" In 1976 and 1977, Roots was a best seller - on the non-fiction list - for six months. In 1977, it won a special Pulitzer award for history. In the form of a seven - part television series in 1977, it drew an audience estimated by the A.C. Nielson Company at 130 million, the biggest in the history of the medium. By the the end of 1977, the roots of the book itself had begun to show. Hayley had apparently helped himself to material from a novel called The African, by Harold Courlander. A British journalist went to Africa to retrace the steps of the clan Kinte-Haley and found out that much of what Haley wrote was based on made-up tales, to phrase it generously. All of which was in grand tradition of the man most historians credit with having originated the modern novel, Daniel Defoe. In 1719, Englishmen were convinced that Defoe really had come across the diary of a shipwrecked sailor named Robinson Crusoe, just as, a few years later, they believed that Richardson's Pamela really was made up of anguished bulletins from a pretty girl living in the house of an aroused and hard-stalking middle-aged lecher."
More:
Referring to his 2006 annual spring address to the Labor party prime minister Tony Blair of Britain " has confirmed to friends that he drew inspiration for his long-sign off from a favorite passage of John Steinbeck's 1939 classic, " The Grapes of Wrath."
" He later admitted he had borrowed heavily from a speech from Tom Joad, the central character of Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the Great Depression."
Shakespeare borrowed the story for Romeo and Juliet from a fellow English writer, who got it from a french writer who translated the story from a 16th century Italian tale by Luigi da Porta, who swore it was based on fact. Charles Lamb on Shakespeare.
In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare incorporated whole sentences from North's Plutarch in to his own text.
More:
"The legend of Hamlet goes back hundres of years before Shakespeare. The bard apparently took assorted parts of the many stories about the Melancholy Dane(who was probably British in the first place),added his own magic,and came up with the play we know.
There apparently was such a man and he did live a prety violent life."
Extract frm "The Joy of Trivia" by Bernie Smith (available at the Hamden library)
K.B. Chandra Raj
T.S.Eliott.
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. T.S. Eliot.
************************************************************************************
The recent legal donnybrook of trans - Atlantic proportions between Dan Brown (American)author of "Da Vinci Code" and Michael Baigent ( British), author of, "The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail"(in the U.S.it is called,"Holy Blood, Holy Grail") moved the soul searching subject - plagiarism - which has been for almost ever on slow boil, to the front burner.
The British judge Peter Smith, after tortuous months of hearings,of charges and denials during which by his own admission he was tempted to run away from the avalanche of reading material thrown at him. Remember : White wigs and black robes do not a wise man make.
Dan Brown admitted to being inspired by his reading of " Holy Blood, Holy Grail" but rejected outright the charge of stealing. Judgment was in favor of American Dan Brown author of, " Da Vinci Code". As if though this was not enough a nondescript curator of the Moscow museum is making similar accusations.
There is a bottom line to all this. Both books have received publicity many fold more than the costs of litigation. The two books have gone into accelerated reprints.
It is in the light of the Brown - Baigent legal brouhaha that the following excerpts, quotations - some attributed, some not though authentic should be viewed.
" Swinburne stole from Keats and Brahms used a theme from Beethoven's Ninth for his First Symphony."
" We all work off each other" E.L.Doctorow, author of, " Ragtime"
" The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something as if it had never been said before." Johann Wolfgang Von
The title, " Gone with the wind" comes from an Ernest Dowson Goethe poem.
The title of Ken Kesey's popular novel, " One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" was lifted from the children's folklore: "...one flew East, One flew West, One flew over the Cuckoo's nest"
" They fake each other's literary wash"
" Once the poet lets go of his poem, it is no longer his. It belongs to any one who wants it, It's a gift" Stanley Kunitz.
" Well stolen is half written"
" Writers are readers moved to emulation."
" Shakespeare like Puccini was a notorious poacher"
Lorrie Moore, professor of English, University of Wisconsin.
" Words make their way in the world without a master, and any one with little cleverness can appropriate them." Deepak Chopra.
Cleverness is what Kaavya Viswanathan,the nineteen year old Harvard sophomore was found to be wanting. For her novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild And Got a Life" for which she is reported to have received an advance of $500,000.00, she had lifted passages into to from Megan Mc.Cafferty's novels, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings" and also from Sophie Kinsella's, "Can You Keep A Secret"
Her defense - the copying was " Unconscious and Unintentional" cuts no ice. It did not pass muster either with the publishers or the public. It is indeed sad that at such a young age she should get a black eye. Egg all over her face.
You have not heard it all. Kaavya Viswanathan's infractions are small potatoes, sophomoric blunders at worst compared to what " author " John Kenney bragged to Larry King. He admitted copying F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and from Dellilo's "White Noise" and is busy copying Jonathan Franzen's "Corrections"
Larry King: " Exact same, in the exact same order?"
John Kenney: "Identical"
Larry King: "Legal problems? Moral problems?"
John Kenney: "Not exactly. My agent and publisher are behind it 100%."
There is some more.
Here is what author Tom Wolfe who needs no introduction says in his book, " In Our Time."
" In 1976 and 1977, Roots was a best seller - on the non-fiction list - for six months. In 1977, it won a special Pulitzer award for history. In the form of a seven - part television series in 1977, it drew an audience estimated by the A.C. Nielson Company at 130 million, the biggest in the history of the medium. By the the end of 1977, the roots of the book itself had begun to show. Hayley had apparently helped himself to material from a novel called The African, by Harold Courlander. A British journalist went to Africa to retrace the steps of the clan Kinte-Haley and found out that much of what Haley wrote was based on made-up tales, to phrase it generously. All of which was in grand tradition of the man most historians credit with having originated the modern novel, Daniel Defoe. In 1719, Englishmen were convinced that Defoe really had come across the diary of a shipwrecked sailor named Robinson Crusoe, just as, a few years later, they believed that Richardson's Pamela really was made up of anguished bulletins from a pretty girl living in the house of an aroused and hard-stalking middle-aged lecher."
More:
Referring to his 2006 annual spring address to the Labor party prime minister Tony Blair of Britain " has confirmed to friends that he drew inspiration for his long-sign off from a favorite passage of John Steinbeck's 1939 classic, " The Grapes of Wrath."
" He later admitted he had borrowed heavily from a speech from Tom Joad, the central character of Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the Great Depression."
Shakespeare borrowed the story for Romeo and Juliet from a fellow English writer, who got it from a french writer who translated the story from a 16th century Italian tale by Luigi da Porta, who swore it was based on fact. Charles Lamb on Shakespeare.
In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare incorporated whole sentences from North's Plutarch in to his own text.
More:
"The legend of Hamlet goes back hundres of years before Shakespeare. The bard apparently took assorted parts of the many stories about the Melancholy Dane(who was probably British in the first place),added his own magic,and came up with the play we know.
There apparently was such a man and he did live a prety violent life."
Extract frm "The Joy of Trivia" by Bernie Smith (available at the Hamden library)
K.B. Chandra Raj
posted by K.B.Chandra Raj at
9:48 AM
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