"The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism"

For this assignment I chose to look at the paragraph on page 213 that begins with "Literature has been plundered..." and ends with "...no plagiarist at all." In the key Lethem cites the passage to be from "God's Little Toys" by William Gibson. In "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism", Lethem uses the passage to provide an anecdote that contrasts what teachers instill in children and what the world is actually like. During the first read of this essay, the reader assumes that the anecdote is that of the author, but once the end is reached, the reader realizes that it is in fact someone else's childhood memory. Lethem provides a clarification that his own first encounter was less epiphanic because his father was a painter and encouraged influence and methods like the "cut-up method" described by Burroughs. Gibson uses his own anecdote in his article in order to introduce his amazement as a child and to enforce the profound impact Burroughs' writing had on him as a future author. He continues on with the article by explaining that everyone owns the world and that he believes everything he writes is some form of collage. He explains that the digital age has made remixes and collages the norm and the originals are rare.
The purpose of the passage is similar in both texts: to show the reader that "plagiarism" is a good thing and influence is inevitable. I think this passage is a good example of how appropriation can change how something is meant. By inserting this paragraph into his work without any quotation marks or in-text citations, Lethem essentially claims the memory as his own. He leaves the pronouns as "I" and "my". This related to another part of Lethem's essay where he claims "Inspiration could be called inhaling he memory of an act never experienced". Lethem directly exemplifies this by using Gibson's memory as his own in order to enforce his point in the essay.
In reading Lethem's essay I learned that "plagiarism" and influence are essential and inevitable. And authors often use many different people's ideas in order to support their own, different individual idea. This is basically exactly what we did in our last paper by coming up with an original idea and using the ideas of Davidson and Johnson to help support our argument.