Passing from Paranoia to Plagiarism: the Abject Authorship of Nella Larsen (original) (raw)

Love and Theft: Plagiarism, Blackface, and Nella Larsen’s “Sanctuary”

American LIterature , 2016

When Nella Larsen’s story “Sanctuary” appeared in the Forum in 1930, readers noted its similarity to “Mrs. Adis,” a tale by the popular British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith. Scholars concur that “Sanctuary” turns a story about British class-consciousness into a story of African American race loyalty. This essay suggests that the intertextuality of Larsen’s “Sanctuary” extends beyond “Mrs. Adis” to a neglected 1903 novella by Edith Wharton, also titled Sanctuary, and that in writing her last story Larsen “blackens up”—imitating, mocking, and distortedly mirroring both sources. Larsen’s “Sanctuary” bitterly critiques the triumph of culture, education, and moral agency in Wharton’s tale, while reworking “Mrs. Adis” to expose group solidarity as a poor substitute for autonomy, segregation in another guise. Larsen’s “Sanctuary” reveals the false promises held out to African Americans by a series of values that were much recommended to them: literacy, filial devotion, Christian charity, and group allegiance.

The Gender of Authorship: Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf

Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 1980

The relationship between sexuality and politics has always been an underlying assumption of the avantgarde. In recent East German avant-garde literature, the notion of authorship as production has become associated with technological rationality and the patriarchal socialist state. The ensuing crisis of the traditional male author has thus led necessarily to a radicalization of subjectivity and to the politics of gender. A comparison of two contemporary texts, one by a female author, one by a male, shows that the crisis of authorship assumes two distinctly different forms when differences in gender are taken into account. The East German authors Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf have exhibited remarkably similar literary and political developments. Two of their most recent texts, Mülller's Hamletmachine and Wolf's No Place. Nowhere, both address the problematic of traditional male authorship and the disintegration of a preconceived literary gender identity. Yet, these two texts exemplify very different assumptions about the relationship between authorship and the literary tradition. Müller's text suggests the imprisonment of the male author within a petrified system of tradition and images, and hence the necessity of deconstruction. Wolf's text manifests a process of creating a new form of female-identified authorship and the possibility of redefining the tradition of literature and its future.

Literary Borrowing … and Stealing: Plagiarism, Sources, Influences, and Intertexts

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 1986

The en tire co rp us of exi sting lit erature should be rega rded as a limbo fr om w hic h d iscern ing a u tho rs co uld draw th eir charac ters as requir ed , crea ting on ly wh en they failed to find a sui ta ble existing puppet. The modern novel sho uld be largely a work of refer en ce. Fl ann O 'Brien , A t Swim-Twa-Bird s Recently we witnessed w ha t happen s tod ay in the literary " int erp retive communit y" wh en a modern no vel-The W hit e Hot el-is even in part a "work of reference." D. M. Thomas's sin, however, seem s to ha ve been th at of enlarg ing th e corp us from which a novelist d raws to include nonfictional , historical text s, in thi s case the testimony of D ina Proniche va, the sole su rvivor of Babi Yar. Although Thomas acknowledged his debt openly on the copyrigh t page of the novel, his more or less verbatim borrowing laun ched an int ense, but perhaps u ltimatel y fruitl ess, debate in th e pages of the Tim es Literary Supplem en t in M ar ch and April of 1982. Thomas's reply' to accusations of opportun istic, exploitive p lagiarism is an interesting one. After po inting out that his novelistic accou nt of Babi Yar is three times th e length of Dina's, th e novelist remarks that at this point in the novel his heroine changes from bein g an individ ual (w hose single unique life is of in teres t to "Sigm und Freud") to bein g only one of many anonymous victims of history. The text, Thomas felt , had to reflect th is chan ge from individual self-expression to common fate, an d it did so in th e modulation of the narrative voice from an authorial one (because, as he writ es, at the start " there is still room for fiction") to that of the recor din g of one who had been there-th e onl y appropriate and truthful voice possible, given the circu m sta nc es. The novel's mu ch m isread epigraph from Yeats underlines thi s progression from the private to the public : W e had fe d the heart on fa n tas ies, The H eart's gro wn brutal from the fa re; M ore sub sta nc e in our en m it ies T h an in ou r love... .

Publish and Perish: Freud’s Claim to Literary Fame

What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphere? Examining this question in the case of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, read here as an autobiographical text, this paper explores the intricate nexus of ambition, death and writing. Freud is possessed by the possibility of becoming famous, a public persona, immortal. His route to achieving this is the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. He aspires to greatness, and yet the very project that is supposed to secure it is fragile and insecure; the very project entails a risk. The same text that could secure one’s immortality becomes the locus of one’s absence. Publishing renders the most intimate text public and at a distance from oneself. The wish for glory cannot be assuaged through a published text, which is a public affair. One cannot make a name for oneself.

Authorship

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

Questions of authorship bring into play many of the central questions of literary theory: questions as to what constitutes the unity and coherence of texts, the interpretive relevance of authorial intention, the relation of oral to literate cultures, the regulation of writing by church and state, the legal underpinnings of literary property, the significance of forgery and plagiarism, and so on. At the heart of many of these questions is a distinction between two different orders of phenomena. Writers are not necessarily authors: authorship requires recognition and attribution, and these depend on institutional processes of publication, textual stabilization, criticism, education, and appropriate legal, regulatory, and economic conditions. Those processes and conditions vary from culture to culture, as do the particular historical forms that authorship takes. In the contemporary world authorship tends to be cast as though it were directly expressive of a personality, an inner core o...

The Pleasure of Its Company: Of One Blood and the Potentials of Plagiarism

American Literary History

In this essay, Sanborn extends his earlier work on Pauline Hopkins’s plagiarism by showing that Hopkins plagiarized a total of 143 passages from 36 texts in her novel Of One Blood and that at least 10,492 of the roughly 52,730 words in the novel—20%—were imported from other people’s publications. Sanborn argues that plagiarism is, for Hopkins, not a canny subversion or artful transmutation of another writer’s work; it is a means by which she can hold her text internally open to other voices and temporalities. It does not point us backward to a critique of the texts from which she drew—texts that she could not have imagined anyone discovering—but forward to the pleasurable possibility of a profoundly mixed-voice world. Like Marvel’s The Black Panther (2018), Of One Blood offers its audience a series of resources for dreaming, a series of larger-and-stranger-than-life scenarios capable of being used in self-transformational ways.