In the reading “The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem, the topic of plagiarism is brought to discussion for another time. While we talk about something, we usually ask “does it matter”. For plagiarism, no doubt it does matter since we should respect the effort others put on creating something new. But Lethem goes beyond that — he talks about how “plagiarism” is closely related to the process of creation in the art world. Here I use the quotation mark for the word plagiarism since it doesn’t carry the same definition we usually used in the academic world. According to Lethem, “appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration”(61) all have an overlap with the “plagiarism”. And what’s more interesting is that these words “consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act”(61).
As Lethem puts it, “Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses” (61). The interconnection between different artworks and the difficulty to distinguish the notion of “inspiration” and “plagiarism” makes it even hard to find the boundary of plagiarism and people’s attitudes toward also vary a lot.
This discussion also reminds me of some debate on the Chinese internet. Plagiarism has recently become a serious issue and the net citizens in China are very strict about this issue. There are many posts comparing how two works have similar(or same) content and once an author is considered as the one who plagiarized, he/she will face severe critique. People often compare this phenomenon with that in ancient China when poets often use some words in other poems (sometimes a very similar sentence) and the community didn’t criticize that but be very open instead. I’m not about to say something against this trend but shift the focus to the potential of overemphasizing the plagiarism. Sometime even one or two similar words will be called plagiarism and that might undermine the general environment.