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Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism
Mallon (English, Vassar) is not the first to come out against plagiarism. A light-hearted look at famous cases from Coleridge to the television series "Falcon Crest". Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
300 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1989
About the author
Thomas Mallon
42 books288 followersThomas Mallon is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers (recently adapted into a miniseries by the same name), Watergate, Finale, Landfall, and most recently Up With the Sun. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One's Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the John F. Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine's Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact).
He is a former literary editor of Gentleman's Quarterly, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column in the 1990s, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and other periodicals. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2005 to 2006.
His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style. He was elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.
He is a former literary editor of Gentleman's Quarterly, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column in the 1990s, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and other periodicals. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2005 to 2006.
His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style. He was elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 10, 2012
I'm a big fan of Thomas Mallon's book about diaries (A Book of One's Own) and totally recommend it. And I give this one three stars. But I really don't recommend it, even though it's written in Mr Mallon's cuddly witty-and-warm style which is like a long chat over mulled wine with a fellow book geek.
The reason is that this book on plagiarism was written in 1986 and his main examples are not that gripping anymore. In the last 30 years there have been so many fun examples of crazy authors blatantly stealing other people's stuff and then being caught by the beavering drones of the mighty internet and falling kersplat from grace like dozens of silly icaruses – icari? – amidst gouts of scarlet embarrassment that really this book is too out of date. He spends 50 pages on the details of a case whereby an academic Jayme Aaron Sokolow ripped off another academic Stephen W Nissenbaum in an article called
Thomas and Mary Nichols and the Paradox of Ante-Bellum Free Love.
Ho hum.
He spends 40 pages giving WAY too much detail about the case of Anita Kornfeld vs Falcon Crest, which we dimly recall was a soap opera. No one dimly recalls Mrs Kornfeld's novel "Vintage" which she claims Falcon Crest ripped off (one of the two GR reviews says "wow – this book needed an editor. Enough said."). So anyway, the creator of Falcon Crest was able to demonstrate that actually, he had no knowledge of Mrs Kornfeld's 600 page novel, in actual fact he was ripping off the 1959 Rock Hudson movie This Earth is Mine ! Ha ha, priceless, I love it! Judge accepted that, case dismissed (after 5 tough expensive years).
Plagiarism is a great and fascinating topic which invades our beloved GR site occasionally – us old timers fondly recall that Ginny, the former number one most popular reviewer here, astounded everyone by her amazing knowledge of every possible field of human endeavour as she reviewed three or four books per day on every conceivable topic, and then we discovered she'd been copying all her reviews from various online journals and newspapers and going to the trouble of spatchcocking and mixing bits from two or three reviews together to form her own. So she got busted and removed from GR overnight – wow. That was a hoot.
You got to love the internet - it makes it easy to plagiarise at the same time that it makes it easy for people to spot plagiarists.
So the internet is become like the effects of drinking alcohol as described by the porter in Macbeth :
it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
You don't have to look far for other recent juicy examples. If we confine ourselves just to novels we have had :
Dan Brown being accused of stealing from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh and Lewis Perdue 's novels The Da Vinci Legacy (1983) and Daughter of God (2000). Both cases were dismissed.
Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life which was hyped up to be the next big YA thing ripped off several other YA and non YA novels, was rumbled just as the first editions were being printed in 2006 - book withdrawn, author withdrawn never to be seen again.
In 2011, Quentin Rowan, writing under the pen name "Q.R. Markham" was found to have extensively plagiarised from several authors in his debut novel, Assassin of Secrets, one week after it was released in the United States. Rowan's novel included passages taken from John le Carre, Robert Ludlum, Christopher McCrary, Charles McCarry and James Bond continuation writers Raymond Benson and John Gardner. Rowan had his contract cancelled and the publisher recalled Assassin of Secrets from bookstores.
Michel Houellebecq - "The Map and the Territory", a satire of the Paris art world was accused by Slate magazine of plagiarizing some passages from the French Wikipedia. Houellebecq admitted to taking the passages, word for word, from Wikipedia, but denied that this was plagiarism. The author says borrowing and reshaping define his writing style. “If these people really think that [this is plagiarism], they haven’t got the first notion of what literature is,” he said. “This approach, muddling real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors.”
Helene Hegemann "Axolotl Roadkill” “was heralded far and wide in German newspapers and magazines as a tremendous debut, particularly for such a young author (she was 17) but a blogger uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes. As other unattributed sources came to light, outsize praise quickly turned to a torrent of outrage.
Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.
One could go on. And of course, the above list of plagiarisms has been lifted from various sources all over the internet without any attribution at all, and passed off as my own creation.
But this trenchant paragraph is from the (UK) Guardian. And yes, this is where we are now at with the whole concept, I think - we're stuck in a labyrinth, and there's no map, there never was a map :
Asking if TS Eliot could have written The Waste Land " if he worried about quoting without attribution", Parini said that "the problem with historical fiction, of course, is that history is full of nuggets of knowledge. How many ways can you say that Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809? If you're describing a certain river, the descriptions of that river will often sound like other descriptions of that river, and so forth. And it's important to remember that literature is a tissue of allusion. We all participate in the language, its writing and thinking; we do so unconsciously more than consciously. It's hard to find a sentence that hasn't been written by someone, somewhere: Isn't that a point made by Borges over and over?"
Written by Alison Flood on 24 November 2011.
The reason is that this book on plagiarism was written in 1986 and his main examples are not that gripping anymore. In the last 30 years there have been so many fun examples of crazy authors blatantly stealing other people's stuff and then being caught by the beavering drones of the mighty internet and falling kersplat from grace like dozens of silly icaruses – icari? – amidst gouts of scarlet embarrassment that really this book is too out of date. He spends 50 pages on the details of a case whereby an academic Jayme Aaron Sokolow ripped off another academic Stephen W Nissenbaum in an article called
Thomas and Mary Nichols and the Paradox of Ante-Bellum Free Love.
Ho hum.
He spends 40 pages giving WAY too much detail about the case of Anita Kornfeld vs Falcon Crest, which we dimly recall was a soap opera. No one dimly recalls Mrs Kornfeld's novel "Vintage" which she claims Falcon Crest ripped off (one of the two GR reviews says "wow – this book needed an editor. Enough said."). So anyway, the creator of Falcon Crest was able to demonstrate that actually, he had no knowledge of Mrs Kornfeld's 600 page novel, in actual fact he was ripping off the 1959 Rock Hudson movie This Earth is Mine ! Ha ha, priceless, I love it! Judge accepted that, case dismissed (after 5 tough expensive years).
Plagiarism is a great and fascinating topic which invades our beloved GR site occasionally – us old timers fondly recall that Ginny, the former number one most popular reviewer here, astounded everyone by her amazing knowledge of every possible field of human endeavour as she reviewed three or four books per day on every conceivable topic, and then we discovered she'd been copying all her reviews from various online journals and newspapers and going to the trouble of spatchcocking and mixing bits from two or three reviews together to form her own. So she got busted and removed from GR overnight – wow. That was a hoot.
You got to love the internet - it makes it easy to plagiarise at the same time that it makes it easy for people to spot plagiarists.
So the internet is become like the effects of drinking alcohol as described by the porter in Macbeth :
it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
You don't have to look far for other recent juicy examples. If we confine ourselves just to novels we have had :
Dan Brown being accused of stealing from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh and Lewis Perdue 's novels The Da Vinci Legacy (1983) and Daughter of God (2000). Both cases were dismissed.
Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life which was hyped up to be the next big YA thing ripped off several other YA and non YA novels, was rumbled just as the first editions were being printed in 2006 - book withdrawn, author withdrawn never to be seen again.
In 2011, Quentin Rowan, writing under the pen name "Q.R. Markham" was found to have extensively plagiarised from several authors in his debut novel, Assassin of Secrets, one week after it was released in the United States. Rowan's novel included passages taken from John le Carre, Robert Ludlum, Christopher McCrary, Charles McCarry and James Bond continuation writers Raymond Benson and John Gardner. Rowan had his contract cancelled and the publisher recalled Assassin of Secrets from bookstores.
Michel Houellebecq - "The Map and the Territory", a satire of the Paris art world was accused by Slate magazine of plagiarizing some passages from the French Wikipedia. Houellebecq admitted to taking the passages, word for word, from Wikipedia, but denied that this was plagiarism. The author says borrowing and reshaping define his writing style. “If these people really think that [this is plagiarism], they haven’t got the first notion of what literature is,” he said. “This approach, muddling real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors.”
Helene Hegemann "Axolotl Roadkill” “was heralded far and wide in German newspapers and magazines as a tremendous debut, particularly for such a young author (she was 17) but a blogger uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes. As other unattributed sources came to light, outsize praise quickly turned to a torrent of outrage.
Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.
One could go on. And of course, the above list of plagiarisms has been lifted from various sources all over the internet without any attribution at all, and passed off as my own creation.
But this trenchant paragraph is from the (UK) Guardian. And yes, this is where we are now at with the whole concept, I think - we're stuck in a labyrinth, and there's no map, there never was a map :
Asking if TS Eliot could have written The Waste Land " if he worried about quoting without attribution", Parini said that "the problem with historical fiction, of course, is that history is full of nuggets of knowledge. How many ways can you say that Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809? If you're describing a certain river, the descriptions of that river will often sound like other descriptions of that river, and so forth. And it's important to remember that literature is a tissue of allusion. We all participate in the language, its writing and thinking; we do so unconsciously more than consciously. It's hard to find a sentence that hasn't been written by someone, somewhere: Isn't that a point made by Borges over and over?"
Written by Alison Flood on 24 November 2011.
June 21, 2025
I want to be the one to tell Thomas Mallon about Cassandra Clare.
September 11, 2013
Full title: Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism
Contents:
Preface
1. Oft Thought, Ere Expressed: From Classical Imitation to International Copyright
2. A Good Reade: Malfeasance and Mlle. de Malepeire
3. The Epstein Papers: Writing a Second First Novel
4. Quiet Goes the Don: An Academic Affair
5. Trampling Out the Vintage: The Fight over Falcon Crest
Postscript
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
............................
The cases in the various chapters:
Chapter 1: history of the progression of written work from imitation/reworking older material to copyright
Chapter 2: "novelette" Mlle. de Malepeire by Mme. Charles Reybaud - published as "The Picture" by Charles Reade (Author Reybaud found in French wikipedia here)
Chapter 3: Jacob Epstein plagiarizes Martin Amis
Chapter 4: Jayme Aaron Sokolow, professor at Texas Tech
Chapter 5: Anita Clay Kornfeld's suit against Falcon Crest (she alleged that chunks of the plot from her novel Vintage were used by the writer Earl Hamner.)
............................
The most interesting thing to note, especially about the more recent cases of plagiarism as well as some referenced in this book - the person accused almost always blames it on
1) sloppy note-taking
2) forgetfulness
3) did it without realizing.
This happens over and over again - and I'm thinking of cases that have occurred in the last few decades in the newspaper business. There's either something going on psychologically here and/or this is a standard lie people think will work. Having been in academia - there's no way if you really know your subject and you are doing your job as a researcher, that you don't know you're lifting entire sentences and even paragraphs from someone else's work. The instances in nonfiction always involve sentences that are long enough and styles of writing specific enough that you don't just "accidentally" write the same thing.
............................
Author cites (among many other books) Handy-book of Literary Curiosities (1909) which you can read online here. You can find the entry about Plagiarism on page 891.
............................
I should note here as a Ch. 4 update: Sokolow did get his work published as a book [here] - in which he used a great quantity of material plagiarized much of the from the work of Stephen W. Nissenbaum:
I'll also add that in no way was the Sokolow case nebulous - academics from multiple universities agreed this was plagiarism.
............................
A news story about the book and Jayme Aaron Sokolow, whose story is told in Chapter 4.
Other useful and interesting links:
Book Review at albany.edu (part of the Science Fraud database)
On Sokolow: "This is a sad telling of a simple case of plagiary and one which would have led to the expulsion of any undergraduate at any university in the country. Faculty get away with much more than undergraduates do."
The Plagiarist: Why Stephen Ambrose is a vampire.
David Plotz, Slate, Jan. 11, 2002
"...Plagiarists steal good stuff and they steal garbage. Some of the liveliest writing in Epstein's novel Wild Oats was embezzled from Amis. Ambrose misappropriated many vivid sentences. Newspaper plagiarists generally pirate boilerplate quotes and analysis that would have been easy for them to gather on their own.
No matter what they steal, they fall back on the same excuses, as Thomas Mallon shows in his wonderful plagiarism book Stolen Words. Before the computer age, they blamed their confusing "notebooks," where they allegedly mixed up their own notes with passages recorded elsewhere. These days, plagiarists claim they mistake electronic files of notes with their own writing."
Contents:
Preface
1. Oft Thought, Ere Expressed: From Classical Imitation to International Copyright
2. A Good Reade: Malfeasance and Mlle. de Malepeire
3. The Epstein Papers: Writing a Second First Novel
4. Quiet Goes the Don: An Academic Affair
5. Trampling Out the Vintage: The Fight over Falcon Crest
Postscript
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
............................
The cases in the various chapters:
Chapter 1: history of the progression of written work from imitation/reworking older material to copyright
Chapter 2: "novelette" Mlle. de Malepeire by Mme. Charles Reybaud - published as "The Picture" by Charles Reade (Author Reybaud found in French wikipedia here)
Chapter 3: Jacob Epstein plagiarizes Martin Amis
Chapter 4: Jayme Aaron Sokolow, professor at Texas Tech
Chapter 5: Anita Clay Kornfeld's suit against Falcon Crest (she alleged that chunks of the plot from her novel Vintage were used by the writer Earl Hamner.)
............................
The most interesting thing to note, especially about the more recent cases of plagiarism as well as some referenced in this book - the person accused almost always blames it on
1) sloppy note-taking
2) forgetfulness
3) did it without realizing.
This happens over and over again - and I'm thinking of cases that have occurred in the last few decades in the newspaper business. There's either something going on psychologically here and/or this is a standard lie people think will work. Having been in academia - there's no way if you really know your subject and you are doing your job as a researcher, that you don't know you're lifting entire sentences and even paragraphs from someone else's work. The instances in nonfiction always involve sentences that are long enough and styles of writing specific enough that you don't just "accidentally" write the same thing.
............................
Author cites (among many other books) Handy-book of Literary Curiosities (1909) which you can read online here. You can find the entry about Plagiarism on page 891.
............................
I should note here as a Ch. 4 update: Sokolow did get his work published as a book [here] - in which he used a great quantity of material plagiarized much of the from the work of Stephen W. Nissenbaum:
"Eventually the matter wound up before the American Association of University Professors, and the result was that "errata slips" were included in copies of the book still not distributed – slips that included numerous footnotes giving credit to Nissenbaum's publications.".(Quote via article by Warren Boroson cited below.) Sokolow wasn't exactly punished for plagiarism - he was allowed to quietly retire from Texas Tech, and even though his book had been refused multiple places (who had all asked Nissenbaum to review the work, as Nissebaum was noted in the field, and he explained the plagiarism) he still managed to get it published by a university press. He now works in a non academic field (and you can easily find him if you google).
I'll also add that in no way was the Sokolow case nebulous - academics from multiple universities agreed this was plagiarism.
............................
A news story about the book and Jayme Aaron Sokolow, whose story is told in Chapter 4.
A memorable case of plagiarism has its roots in New JerseyRead the rest at the link above.
Warren Boroson, New Jersey Newsroom.com, 26 July 2010
"...Jayme Aaron Sokolow was born in 1946 in Perth Amboy. He received a B.A. from Trenton State College in 1968 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1972. He joined the history department of Texas Tech University in Lubbock in 1976. (A few years earlier, a reviewer of the history department supposedly said, "What this department needs is a good New York Jew." Mallon interprets this as a prescription "admiring brains, energy, and sophistication.")
Sokolow was prolific. He published article after article on all sorts of diverse historical subjects, Mallon reports, from the 18th century American scientist Benjamin Thompson to Benjamin Franklin's supposed influence on Leo Tolstoy.
He had even put together a book-length manuscript called "Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and the Origins of Victorian Sexuality in America."
Texas Tech's history department was at this point considering Sokolow both for tenure and for promotion to associate professor of history.
But then came revelations that some of Sokolow's publications had borrowed heavily from earlier publications, without sufficient attribution. In 1981, Mallon writes, the "undoing of Jayme Sokolow really began."
Sokolow had submitted an article entitled "Thomas and Mary Nichols and the Paradox of Ante-Bellum Free Love" to an academic journal. The journal's editor sent it to Professor Lawrence Foster for evaluation. Foster concluded that the article had clearly been plagiarized from the work of Professor Stephen W. Nissenbaum of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. (Nissenbaum, by the way, now professor emeritus, informs me that he was born and raised in Jersey City, N.J.) Foster wrote to Nissenbaum on Dec. 18, 1980, that it seemed to be "the clearest case of plagiarism I have ever seen." "
Other useful and interesting links:
Book Review at albany.edu (part of the Science Fraud database)
On Sokolow: "This is a sad telling of a simple case of plagiary and one which would have led to the expulsion of any undergraduate at any university in the country. Faculty get away with much more than undergraduates do."
The Plagiarist: Why Stephen Ambrose is a vampire.
David Plotz, Slate, Jan. 11, 2002
"...Plagiarists steal good stuff and they steal garbage. Some of the liveliest writing in Epstein's novel Wild Oats was embezzled from Amis. Ambrose misappropriated many vivid sentences. Newspaper plagiarists generally pirate boilerplate quotes and analysis that would have been easy for them to gather on their own.
No matter what they steal, they fall back on the same excuses, as Thomas Mallon shows in his wonderful plagiarism book Stolen Words. Before the computer age, they blamed their confusing "notebooks," where they allegedly mixed up their own notes with passages recorded elsewhere. These days, plagiarists claim they mistake electronic files of notes with their own writing."
September 12, 2008
Alrighty, this is what Seana would call a "nerd alert" book. This book started off pretty slow for me. I had some trouble getting into it, the chapters were ridiculously long, and I was very tempted to just stop and put the book down. But then after the second chapter the book picked up out of nowhere and I couldn't put the thing down. One of the arguments that seems to be reiterated through out the book is how closely plagiarism is compared to rape! Those who are a victim of having their worked plagiarized feel as though their words and art were taken from them. They lost their voice similar to a victim of rape. Although I still feel that the comparison is extreme, I can see the connection.
The other comparison that I found rather interesting, is those who do plagiarize are often compared to kleptomaniacs. Its an addiction for them, and they do it without thinking after awhile. One author who was famous for being addicted to not only plagiarizing but also to opium, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The other thing that was pretty interesting is those who accuse and seek out plagiarizers, are often found to be plagiarizing themselves! Charles Reade was found often to point the finger and was an advocate for international copyright laws, but happened to plagiarize many plays and novels from the french.
One thought that kept recurring for me was how frightened I was in college to be accused of plagiarizing. I cited everything! The author mentions a story about F. Scott Fitzgerald being so afraid that he plagiarized a character's description from The Great Gatsby that he sent his manuscript to the author (that he thought he stole the character from) to make sure that the details weren't similar. And I can see this to be a fear for many creative writers and authors. In all my classes, it was always reiterated to us that we weren't born and raised in a cave, our writing is always influenced by something: other novels, music, movies, life experiences. Its very easy to have read a novel 10-20 years ago and forget about it, but then possibly write something very similar if we remember the idea.
Well, I'll stop blabbering now, but this book was very good. I recommend this to everyone, especially those who write.
The other comparison that I found rather interesting, is those who do plagiarize are often compared to kleptomaniacs. Its an addiction for them, and they do it without thinking after awhile. One author who was famous for being addicted to not only plagiarizing but also to opium, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The other thing that was pretty interesting is those who accuse and seek out plagiarizers, are often found to be plagiarizing themselves! Charles Reade was found often to point the finger and was an advocate for international copyright laws, but happened to plagiarize many plays and novels from the french.
One thought that kept recurring for me was how frightened I was in college to be accused of plagiarizing. I cited everything! The author mentions a story about F. Scott Fitzgerald being so afraid that he plagiarized a character's description from The Great Gatsby that he sent his manuscript to the author (that he thought he stole the character from) to make sure that the details weren't similar. And I can see this to be a fear for many creative writers and authors. In all my classes, it was always reiterated to us that we weren't born and raised in a cave, our writing is always influenced by something: other novels, music, movies, life experiences. Its very easy to have read a novel 10-20 years ago and forget about it, but then possibly write something very similar if we remember the idea.
Well, I'll stop blabbering now, but this book was very good. I recommend this to everyone, especially those who write.
August 5, 2007
An excellent, thoroughly readable, exploration of plagiarism. Mallon eschews the usual platitudes - the result is a fascinating and insightful discussion of a topic of interest to writers and readers alike. I particularly enjoyed his musings on the possible motivation of plagiarists, their co-existing desires to conceal the fact of plagiarism with an apparent subconscious desire to be exposed. In this day and age, it seems impossible that anyone might expect to "get away with it", yet the practice continues, apparently unabated.
March 3, 2017
Despite it being dated (first published 1998 and even with a revision and new search engine-savvy afterward, still dated), this was a lively and interesting read.
August 4, 2023
This book was an interesting read, but doesn't quite live up to the breathless blurb on the cover ("The classic book on plagiarism). Through five case studies Thomas Mallon looks at what plagiarism is, and what it isn't, and why it takes place.
After a brief history lesson on the beginnings of copyright, Mallon looks at the career of Laurence Sterne and his theft from Robert Burton. He then moves on to the case of Charles Reade, and his copying of Mlle. de Malepeire, academic malfeasance in Texas, the sad case of Jacob Epstein's copying of Martin Amis, before tracking his way through the Falcon Crest saga.
He uses these examples to not only delve into the nature of plagiarism, but also to try to investigate why plagiarists do what they do. He is fascinated by the fact that many plagiarists are very active in hunting out others that have engaged in the same activity. Charles Reade in particular was vociferous in his denigration of those who stole from their French compatriots, and yet he blatantly copied Mlle. de Malepeire by Mme. Reybaud...when he didn't need to after his own successful career. It seems that many plagiarists have what Mallon calls "a death wish"....they actually want to get caught. The case of Jacob Epstein, son of literary lions Barbara and Jason, is a case in point. Stealing large chunks of Martin Amis was bound to be found out eventually, but the embarrassment of actually being found out by Martin himself made the scandal all the more juicy for the newspapers.
In academia, Mallon shows us that a fear of litigation can lead to plagiarists thriving, and that the excuse of "I mixed up my notebooks" has been alive and well for hundreds of years. However, sometimes something that is similar is not plagiarism. After all, there are only so many stories, and so many ways you can describe an individual event. The key, as Mallon shows us, is in the words - plots can't be copyrighted, but words can, and plagiarism is really stealing words rather than ideas.
Overall, this book was easy to read and interesting, but in my opinion there was a bit too much blow-by-blow description and not enough discussion of the motivation behind the examples he writes about. I think more philosophical musing might have made this work a bit better...but you may differ.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
After a brief history lesson on the beginnings of copyright, Mallon looks at the career of Laurence Sterne and his theft from Robert Burton. He then moves on to the case of Charles Reade, and his copying of Mlle. de Malepeire, academic malfeasance in Texas, the sad case of Jacob Epstein's copying of Martin Amis, before tracking his way through the Falcon Crest saga.
He uses these examples to not only delve into the nature of plagiarism, but also to try to investigate why plagiarists do what they do. He is fascinated by the fact that many plagiarists are very active in hunting out others that have engaged in the same activity. Charles Reade in particular was vociferous in his denigration of those who stole from their French compatriots, and yet he blatantly copied Mlle. de Malepeire by Mme. Reybaud...when he didn't need to after his own successful career. It seems that many plagiarists have what Mallon calls "a death wish"....they actually want to get caught. The case of Jacob Epstein, son of literary lions Barbara and Jason, is a case in point. Stealing large chunks of Martin Amis was bound to be found out eventually, but the embarrassment of actually being found out by Martin himself made the scandal all the more juicy for the newspapers.
In academia, Mallon shows us that a fear of litigation can lead to plagiarists thriving, and that the excuse of "I mixed up my notebooks" has been alive and well for hundreds of years. However, sometimes something that is similar is not plagiarism. After all, there are only so many stories, and so many ways you can describe an individual event. The key, as Mallon shows us, is in the words - plots can't be copyrighted, but words can, and plagiarism is really stealing words rather than ideas.
Overall, this book was easy to read and interesting, but in my opinion there was a bit too much blow-by-blow description and not enough discussion of the motivation behind the examples he writes about. I think more philosophical musing might have made this work a bit better...but you may differ.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
May 1, 2013
Mallon has some useful insights to offer into a topic that seems to have grown hotter since he originally published this in 1989 (a 2000 edition has a brief afterword commenting on plagiarism in our digital age, but I found the ideas in this section thin). Overall, Mallon's case studies provide depth more than generalization, but still manage to extrapolate and discuss the commonalities underlying the plagiarism impulse. Ultimately, Mallon seems to see plagiarism is driven by the author's ego, and subscribes to the idea that words can convey identity and genius. In other words, his take on the issue is as far from poststructuralist as you can get. Nonetheless, he offers readers more questions than answers and ultimately forces them to draw their own conclusions about the impulse and meaning behind a practice that is difficult to empirically capture.
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