Like Wim, I think this is a good can to open (though I prefer pate to
worms).

I also agree with Wim that to tackle an individual instance of
appropriation, one wants as much material evidence from different
genetic angles as possible.  My sense, too, of William's question is
that he wants to find the line, or perhaps tipping point, at which
readers say: wait, that's an appropriation.  Is it enough that the
appropriate is just an "echo"?  Is it a sprinkling of words in a
paragraph that also appear in another writer's paragraph, on the same or
similar topic.  Is it a string of exactly the same words?  If so, how
many words in the string?  Can it be a string of words that is slightly
modified but has the same impact?  These kinds of questions ask for
specific, in some cases numerical answers.  For instance, in researching
recently a plagiarism case now brewing in Israel (in which a little
known American-Israeli writer has charged a best-selling
American-Israeli with plagiarism), I read that Israeli law (and this may
be true of other legal institutions) requires at least 400 words being
lifted.  Seems a bit arbitrary.  (I got this online and I don't recall
the context in which 400 words is supposed to appear, nor do I wish this
to be taken as fact until it is further researched.)

Now, if we get passed "echo" and dismiss that as not plagiarism, and get
to actual strings of words quoted but not cited or acknowledged, and if
we take some legalistic numerical approach, I think we still have to
confront problems of genesis and (I would add) intentionality and
identity.  That is, once we determine that an appropriation is not from
a single proprietary source (let's say another person's novel as opposed
to your own creativity, whatever that means) but from an earlier source
drawn upon by both you and the other, then we have to consider, it seems
to me, other factors and questions and another tipping point.  To what
extent has the source text become in the culture what I would call a
"shared text," that is, no one would charge you with plagiarism if you,
without quotes or mention of Shakespeare, put the phrase "leave her to
heaven" into your own text.  At some point, Hamlet became everybody's
possession (just as all of language is our shared possession).  So when
does a source text become fair game (and this is a different question
from when does a text enter public domain).  A related question, too, is
what is the writer's intention in appropriating: how conscious is s/he
in the process.  In 2002 a couple American "popular" historians (Stephen
Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin) were separately caught in plagiarism
scandals b/c they failed to notice that passages from others they had
put into their notes were not actually written by themselves.  Now, I
ask (in my Variants 4 essay on Moby-Dick and ethics) how it is that a
writer doesn't know what s/he has written.  This seems to be an
unintended (or conveniently unintended, hence intended) forgetting of
who one is.  

So we find published writers taking large chunks of what we would call
quotation and inserting them without citation into their own writing and
claiming they had forgotten they had not written these words originally
themselves.  This is surely an ethical failure, but it is also something
of a textual identity crisis.  If you don't know or own up to your own
words and the words of others; if you don't know the difference, then do
you know who your are?  

yrs,
John

___________
John Bryant, English Department, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549
>>> [log in to unmask] 08/29/07 10:11 AM >>>
(Wim Van Mierlo, you mentioned I may be opening a can of worms with my
inquiry, but I guess that's precisely where I'm headed -- can opener in
hand.)

Perhaps this might be an informal survey of sorts, but I'm curious to
know what kind of textual evidence convinces scholars that one author
intentionally and consciously lifted material from another author.  My
question to the group is this:  when observing influence, at what point
does the evidence favor conscious and deliberate appropriation over any
other kind of incidental, unconscious influence?  More specifically, and
perhaps more personally, what kind of textual evidence is required to
convince you that a writer consciously borrowed material from someone
else?

[Wim Van Mierlo]  William, I've got my can opener ready as well. My
approach is to influence is textual and book historical (that is to say,
empirical and a tad positivistic): I want to see the evidence before I
am convinced and I like the evidence to be quite specific.That is why I
am interested in marginalia, reading notes, etc. and why I want to see
them as part of the "genetic" process.
 
Wim