Lethem Reading Assignment

I studied and analyzed the first part of “The Ecstasy of Influence: Plagiarism”, “Love and Theft”. “Love and Theft” is has a segment of Michael Maar’s book “The Two Lolitas”. In the short segment, Love and Theft seems to take a little bit of the plagiarism aspect and focus on that. Whereas Michael Maar’s book seems to analyze how this phenomenon of appropriation. For example, a segment further down from the first quote of “a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger,” Micahel Maar seems to be fascinated with how the two books could have been so similar or what if the second book that Nabokov wrote was not published in the first place. “He could easily, at any rate, have crossed its author’s path. Heinz von Lichberg lived for fifteen years in the south-west of Berlin, practically in the same neighbourhood as did Nabokov,” (Maar). But Maar does not jump to any conclusions unlike what the passage is implying in “Love and Theft”. “Love and Theft” uses Maar’s analysis as an example of plagiarism and later goes on to talk about literature being plundered and plagiarized for a long time. This ties back to Donne’s quote that “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated”. Donne was a religious person and this was meant as a religious connotation, but Lethem used this quote to imply that nothing is original because everything is “translated into a better language”.