Le faux littéraire

Abstract

This thesis offers both a survey of representative French language literary plagiarisms from Corneille's Le Cid to contemporary internet downloading, and an evaluation of theoretical approaches to plagiarism and plagiarism-related subjects including intertextuality, pastiche, heteroglossia, and citation. The author argues that all-encompassing theoretical approaches to plagiarism cannot account for vast variations, both in the motivation for plagiarizing on the part of the author, and in the reception of the plagiarized material by individual readers and by the literary/discursive community. Varying standards of acceptability for plagiarized texts are contingent upon the historical, political, geographical and legal juncture within which they are undertaken, and the consequences of plagiarisms uncovered vary accordingly. Nevertheless, the author notes an important relationship between prevailing socio-economic relations within the society and the ways in which plagiarism is regarded by the institutions entrusted with the regulation of, for example, copyright, author's rights, and the publishing industry. After considering the findings and failings of the growing corpus of approaches to plagiarism from Angenot to Zumthor, the author concludes that at the end of the day, approaches are most significantly narrowed-down to categories that uphold or reject the practise of plagiarism. Two extreme examples of these categories would be the corporations' attempts to purchase for all time the rights to the reproduction and diffusion of literary texts, and the Bakhtin-inspired approach that emphasizes the point that utterances are common to communities of speakers, and as such redundancy and repetition are inevitable--but so too is assurance that the originality of each repetition will be affirmed by the ever-changing context within which it is spoken. The latter approach, deemed utopic within the present system of economic relations, is not upheld as a panacea: indeed the very practise of enforcing anti-plagiarism legislation stems from a desire to protect authors and their work, and to uphold and safeguard the quality of creativity as a fundamental human impulse. Stretching this enforcement to the point of economically-motivated punitive action must nevertheless be questioned with reference interdiscursivity lest the author's words he deemed separable from their very social source.