Jonathan Lethem’s third paragraph in “Contamination Anxiety” is
an excerpt from Dave Itzkoff’s New York Times’s article “The Bear Who Was There
at the Start of It all”. Itzkoff uses “The Simpsons” courtroom scene as way to
introduce his articles main idea. In the scene, the cartoon producer of the
show Itchy and Scratchy exclaims “Animation
is built on plagiarism! You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they
going to come from?” Itzkoff explains that with this scene, the producers of “The
Simpsons” were alluding to William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the creators of
Yogi Bear. This animated character was inspired by the Yankees catcher, “The
Honeymooners” Ed Norton, and the behavioral traits of Bugs Bunny. Just like the
creators of Yogi bear “borrowed” ideas from previous shows ad personalities. Many
other cartoons surged that way. Likewise, Lethem incorporates the excerpt in
his essay as an example of how “appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion,
and sublimated collaboration” become an absolute necessity when it comes to the
creative act (Lethem 214). It is interesting how Itzkoff uses the paragraph as
his article’s introduction while Lethem uses it to exemplify his argument, but
both sustain the same ideas: extremely successful cartoons are the product of plagiarism.
This transformation of appropriation taught me that Lethem had to invest a lot
of time and dedication in order to complete his college text. It is amazing how
he found and connected all these excerpts from interviews, articles, and book
reviews and created a complete, interesting, fluid essay. Some people view plagiarism
as a crime, but Lethem showed that if you combine different texts or ideas, you
generate a creative, new project. By “borrowing” from other authors he did not
change or affect the original piece, he just copy-pasted them into a new
context.
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