Latest issue of The New Yorker has a piece about a guy named Quentin Rowan, a writer who produced under the pen name Q.R. Markham. I used the term "produced" advisedly, because Rowan stands alone at the pinnacle of the mountain called Plagiarism. This debut novelist, who had published a number of works before, was discovered to have copied virtually the entire text of a forthcoming novel Assassin of Secrets (for which he had been given an advance and of which 6,500 copies had actually been published) from dozens of already-published sources. The amazing thing about this guy is that the plagiarism was so wide-reaching, the book is constructed "almost entirely from other people's sentences and paragraphs . . . a singular literary artifact," according to the New Yorker article. What's more, Rowan, 34, has left a train of plagiarized works stretching out ten years behind him. Examples of the plagiarized passages can be found here.
I note this for a couple of reasons: first, it's fascinating to me as a writer how much effort this guy used to cheat . . . probably much more than would have been required to write the thing himself. The second reason is much more personal. I don't teach at the university level any longer because plagiarism was so rampant and even when it was exposed, it was tolerated and students were not disciplined. What happened was I was disciplined, i.e., not allowed to teach anymore when I made too much noise about letting cheaters get by with cheating.
Cheaters never gain is a quaint expression, but there's no true in it.
2 comments:
Plagiarism is actually promoted, I think, as it measures the effectiveness of social propaganda: to wit, the lack of new thoughts means the mental void is sufficiently and comfortably filled by the "common sense" of the platitudes of normal society.
Only you, sir, could have come up with such an observation. Which. upon examination, seems to have a lot of truth in it. I'm a little more prosaic. I think it's cheating in whatever venue. Like HGH or steroids in professional sports.
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