Postmodern Plagiarisms

Book excerpt: This monograph takes on the question of how literary plagiarism is defined, exposed, and sanctioned in Western culture and how appropriating language assigned to another author can be considered a radical subversive act in postmodern US-American literature. While various forms of art such as music, painting, or theater have come to institutionalize appropriation as a valid mode to ventilate what authorship, originality, and the anxiety of influence may mean, the literary sphere still has a hard time acknowledging the unmarked acquisition of words, ideas, and manuscripts. The author shows how postmodern plagiarism in particular serves as a literary strategy of appropriation at the interface between literary economics, law, and theoretical discourses of literature. She investigates the complex expectations surrounding the strong link between an individual author subject and its alienable text, a link that several postmodern writers powerfully question and violate. Identifying three distinct practices of postmodern plagiarism, the book examines their specific situatedness, precepts, and subversive potential as litmus tests for the literary market, and the ongoing dynamic notion of the concepts authorship, originality, and creativity.