When a high school student plagiarizes, it would be expected her/his teacher would catch it and fail the student's sullied paper. In college, plagiarism might mean failing the entire course. Indeed, I knew a fellow graduate student who failed his dissertation and lost his PhD - forever, at any university - because he copied a single passage from another's dissertation without citation.
Helene Hegemann, 17 years old, wrote a novel about a 16 year-old girl involved in the drug and club scene in Berlin. Hegemann copied many, many passages from the published Blog of a person writing about drug life in Berlin who used a pseudonym to protect his job and his family. When confronted she admitted she had copied from the Blog. She claims her generation sees things differently. They can take what they need, mix and match to make new things.
Her novel, Axolotl Roadkill, is now number two in Germany. The teen-aged author copied from another, and admits it. She says her generation sets a new standard of using whatever they need to create change, with no apology. Indeed, her novel is proclaimed in Germany as being "definitive" of her generation.
Seated opposite me in the physical therapy clinic waiting room this afternoon was a distinguished looking elderly gentleman. Maybe eighty. I noticed his reading material. "Axolotl! " I said. "Yes, yes, it's interesting", he responded. "There's hope yet."
So, what have we learned here? A gifted teenager writes a novel. She copies what she needs, with no annotation and no apology. Her writing is current, and crazy. Where she got it makes no difference to readers of all ages. Her book is # 2, risen from # 5 last week. She has achieved a position authors of greater novels have not achieved in their lifetimes.
Tomorrow I'll buy a copy of Axolotl Roadkill, in spite of not wanting to contribute to blatant plagiarism. I want to find out why this novel means "there's hope yet" to a person my age. Thus I am drawn in.
I would be truly honored if you gave your poetic advice on my blogs of poetry and follow them.
ReplyDeletehttp://thehumanicana.blogspot.com/
http://humanicanagold.blogspot.com/
I think this is somehow consonant with that Hero of Raves: the DJ who mixes and matches other people's music to create an "original" performance, then spins it and might even offer downloads or CDs of those mixes. This does happen and some DJs have become very well known for their artistic abilities in mixing.
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of taking what exists and turning it into something new and, yes, original. We also see people taking a piece of art and adapting it into something quite different from the thing the original artist had intended.
That is all, I think, an unfortunate trend, but one that has been coming for some times. A new piece of art? Piece of writing? Generational avant gardes might well disagree.
Palmer Hall writes about "taking what exists and turning it into something new," and I think of something like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, or 1,000 Acres, two novels that recast plays by Shakespeare into something new and very original. But neither one lifts dialogue straight from WS, so I think that lifting text verbatim from a blog and creating a "novel" from that goes beyond what is acceptable, and I am distressed that readers of this book don't care about that.
ReplyDeleteI think this is different than DJs who mix sources, if DJs are truly absorbing and re-inventing bits of sound that are already part of popular culture. If it's truly re-invented, I see nothing wrong with drawing on influences. I may be mistaken, but I don't think that's what the law says. I believe it's permissible to cover a song or create a parody, but the moment you do any sampling it's stealing. Maybe someone who knows for sure can answer.
ReplyDeleteFrom the description of Axolotl Roadkill, what this author has done is stealing, mixed with some reinventing. She's lifting from sources that aren't well known - not the same as mixing cultural references. I think that idea is disrespectful and lazy. Artists should push themselves more bravely than that.
It's interesting to note that Axolotl Roadkill is not open for so much as a limited peek inside on Google Book Search or on Amazon. Is Helene Hegemann afraid someone will copy her?
Disclaimer - Haven't read it, will eat my words if I'm wrong, am smug enough to think it won't come to that.
Palmer - Yes, very like a DJ. But also different in that these DJs do create something new. From what I understand, Hegemann took others' writing - from at least five authors - and altho' she claims that is her justification, she actually did not create anything new. Even if she had been able to mix up a new creation, would the end justify the means? The art works, for example, emerge as different "takes" - new concepts from old products.
ReplyDeleteYes, Pat, that's exactly what distresses me. She mixed and matched all right - and her book is not a novel, more like a diary with changing writing styles. Hegemann claims it's not a diary - but "an experiment." Unbelievable it was published, is selling very well, and is up for an award. The question is - will our standing copyright laws change in this Information Age?
ReplyDeleteElizabeth - This strange world of publishing. Yes, she took from little known works, and now at least one of them has had a pronounced rise in sales because of the plagiarism she finally had to admit and defend. How to be a successful author in the 21st century.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading a biography of Wordsworth, in which the author comments, "Like
ReplyDeleteWilliam's earlier long poem, "An Evening Walk" 'filched' extensively from
his favourite melancholic authors, Collins, Thomson, Charlotte Smith and
Beattie, but his newer interests also left their mark in a phrase lifted out
of Tasso and lengthy borrowings from both Milton and Horace. The poem was
typical of the poetic conventions of the day in subject and in style. The
allusions to, and quotations from, the work of other poets, which seem like
mere plagiarism today, were then regarded as a sort of dazzling display, a
game in which the poet could show off his erudition and the reader could
test his own skill by identifying them."
(Juliet Barker: Wordsworth, A Life)
It seems that our current conventions on plagiarism are what's really new.
I have not read this book so I can't really comment.As I am a collagist of art and occasionally poetry I'm in favour of mix and match.I believe it does result in a brand new and often exciting work . It requires a lot of skill to make it appear seamless.I was so successful in producing a poem of this type just recently that I was accused by several poets, of dubious intellectual prowess, of
ReplyDeleteplagiarising an entire poem when it was derived from at leat ten different poems by the same poet.
In law the boundaries on intellectual property are blurred to a certain extent.In literature I always quote the author and page numbers from the works from which it is derived.I think that would have been appropriate in the case of the novel that you are discussing.I do not understand
why an author would not do this anyway.It doesn't detract from the work itself in anyway.