Plagiarism vs intertextuality

Via EFDL, El Plagio Literario. Quim Monzó, Luis Racionero and Lucía Etxebarría apparently see themselves as practicians of intertextuality rather than plagiarists, but that’s surely from their perspective.

Surely virtually no Spanish readers will have read or even heard of their sources, Courrier International, Gilbert Murray and Antonio Colinas. And so, surely, virtually all Spanish readers would say that had they really wanted to practise intertextuality for such an ignorant public (as opposed to for their knowing selves) then they would have indicated their debt. And that by not doing so they were plagiarists, thieves.

But Spanish jurisprudence seems to disagree. In the case of Cela it was ruled that a good writer simply could not be a plagiarist, and in the first Etxebarría case (she settled the second one) that mere commoners were incapable of telling the difference between plagiarism and intertextuality. Justice reduced to: “Do you know who I am?”

Of course, with software piracy in Spain still ten percentage points higher than in the rest of Western Europe, and institutional Spain waist-deep in construction-related corruption, it may be that Spanish plagiarists are simply intertextualising public morality.

Trevor @ 27 September 2008 12:40 PM

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Comments

1. La Peste
   12:00 PM on 28 September 2008

   Well, with Spanish political discourse itself plagiarized directly from the 16th century…

   Also interesting is your embedded implication that the Iberian intelligentsia in general might be capable of coming up with an original idea.

2. kalebeul » Cameo appearance by George Borrow in Valle-Inclán novel
   8:03 AM on 4 October 2008

   [...] of Spain’s greatest 20th century plagiarists intertextualisers was the novelist Valle-Inclán. His gypsies are substantially borrowed from George of that name, [...]

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