plagiarism

Traversing a variety of digital and print formats, this critical prelude introduces the possibilities of tracing the networked associations enacted in Heath by Tan Lin. The writing explores Actor-Network-Theory across platforms, considering Heath both as an actor-network in ANT terms and a coterminous mode of sociological accounting. Like ANT, Heath attempts a process of demystification through detailed description, tactical citation, assemblage, and the critical deployment of mediators and their relations, where every actor is understood as network. More directly, this paper traces the ways Heath translates diverse mediators from the digital event (the non-events) of Heath Ledger's death into an actor-network exploiting a material book format. Thus the task of the critic is to crunch the details of these manifold relations as they are situated in Heath — to describe the network enacted through Lin's ambient citations and novelistic formulations.

(Source: Author's abstract)

At the opening of his influential essay entitled "Critifiction: Imagination As Plagiarism," novelist and critic Raymond Federman[1] says:

We are surrounded by discourses: historical, social, political, economic, medical, judicial, and of course literary.
Raymond Federman

He then goes on to suggest two things: one, that the imagination should be used as an essential tool that leads to the formulation of a discourse and, two, that the practice of plagiarism is embedded within the creative process since the writing of a discourse always implies bringing together pieces of other discourses.
This reminds me of a conversation I once had with the novelist Kathy Acker[2]. We were on a radio program together in Boulder, Colorado, and the interviewer asked her where she got her "writer's voice" from? Acker replied "What voice? There's no voice in my work: I just steal shit."

(Source: Author's Introduction)

Húmus by Herberto Helder (1967) is recognized for its direct quotation from Raul Brandão’s 1921 poem of the same name. However, Helder’s work is more than the simple intertextual suggestion of a text: it transforms it, putting into motion its latent power, reviving it. As may be read in the epigraph of this work, the "words, sentences, fragments, images" from Húmus are used by Helder in order to achieve, through re-writing, a full reading of the text by Brandão. Such reading multiplies and transforms the meanings that are crystalized in the work by Brandão, thus articulating the scope the poet refers: "freedoms, freedom."

Maria dos Prazeres Gomes, in Outrora Agora (Once Now, 1993), seeks to map the dialogical relationships in Portuguese poetry of invention, which according to the term coined by Haroldo de Campos, constitute a "plagiarian/plagiotropic movement of the culturally settled forms" (19). Including Helder’s texts in a vast set of texts marked by a "critical-ludic-transgressive attitude" (22), Gomes defines plagiotropia within a conceptual domain (20) that involves several theoretical concepts such as metalanguage, intertextuality, dialogism and parody. Despite having articulated all these concepts, the critical-ludic-transgressive attitude of Portuguese poetry involves, in her opinion, an enhanced "operation of translation in the sense of a critical rereading of tradition" (20).

To creatively explore the plagiotropic relationships between Helder and Brandão’s work, we have engaged in our own plagiarian experiment in the creation of a third work. The text generator, also entitled Húmus, draws upon its predecessors as databases, allowing readers to, once again, re-read the tradition and conceptualize the links between its historical forbears.

(Source: Author's Introduction)