Plagiarism, in short, is a fine principle for composition...especially forced composition. But even if not forced, in its more respectable form of "imitation," it is the soil out of which all art grows...
Joanna
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No shit. And after you (or one) gets over this absurd requirement to be original, as it obviously can't even be defined, it makes you wonder where the idea ever got started in the first place. Meanwhile, the biggest irony of all is discovering something actually original, only through systematically modeling something else with the full intent of copying it exactly and then failing. I think the trick here is to use a filter, like memory so that the accidental deformities and mistaken associations blend with whatever is the residue of the work to be reproduced.
And something similar occurs when you try to reproduce, recite or perform a known work, say a poem, a play, a piece of music---which gets back to part of Carrol's point about the Iliad. But then whole cultures engage in this kind of loosely defined reproduction or plagiarism, when there is a collective attempt to return to a golden age. Mass culture is full of this sort thing with endless period tableaux. Some of these are amazingly wrong, especially if you have lived in the period that has been reproduced. But like mirrors in mirrors, seeing one of these period set pieces, better reveals the mind set of the reproduction, rather than period reproduced.
Chuck Grimes