"The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism"

I chose to analyze the passage that begins with "The surrealists believed . . ." and ends with the quote by Walter Benjamin. The key cites this passage to be from Christian Keathley's book Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, which details the way Joseph Cornell was "as fascinated and distracted" by a certain Hollywood movie as he was with its average rated star, which ultimately alludes to the idea that a viewer incorporates their subjective preferences into a filmmaker's work. Keathley argues that criticism of works should be performed with reasoned tact, not surrealistic delirium.

In "The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism," Lethem adds his own ideas to Keathley's argument. By explaining our tendency to see the world in a frame, in terms only of how objects are meant to serve us, Lethem establishes Keathley's text as the foundation that holds together his own original ideas. He  encourages us to place objects in unexpected context in order to "reinvigorate their mysterious qualities," and explains that the process of framing objects in a lens in photography and cinema could do this automatically.

This transformation demonstrates that plagiarism should not necessarily have a negative connotation as long as the author appropriates a text for the sole purpose of bolstering his/her own original ideas. As a collective society, we bounce ideas off each other constantly in day-to day communication, and writing should function the same way.