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Fw: Fw: Speaking of plagiarism
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----- Original Message -----
From: Chaswe@aol.com
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2004 9:48 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Speaking of plagiarism
Isn't plagiarism a relatively modern obsession? I remember reading that Pope kept notebooks in which he recorded anything worthwhile he heard or read, for future poetic use. There is the well-known Wilde-Whistler exchange: "I wish I'd said that!" "You will, Oscar, you will". Churchill lifted his oft-quoted remark about democracy being the least bad form of government straight from Aristotle. A.J.P.Taylor is credited with "History is merely a version of events", but it seems it was said by Napoleon.
Didn't the modern concept of copyright arise in the first half of the C18th, with the development of a free enterprise economy, and when artistic pirating began to have serious consequences for the artistic entrepreneur? Hogarth and Voltaire both became very uptight about their artistic properties. Money counts: how much did the Ur-Lolita earn its author? Meanwhile, in Travesties, Tom Stoppard makes Tristan Tzara say: "All poetry is a reshuffling of a pack of picture cards, and all poets are cheats." Since man hasn't changed much in the last 30,000 years there isn't anything new to say, only slightly new ways of saying it; and art is inherently cannibalistic and plagiaristic, if that's really the right word.
Charles Harrison Wallace