This passage is lifted from Steve Fuller's The Intellectual. In this book, Fuller attempts to describe what classifies a person as an "intellectual". In this passage, he suggests that Dr. Swanson's skill in solving a biomedical research problem was not in doing original research, but rather in combining existing sources in a novel way. In this manner, finding new combinations of existing material is just as intellectual as creating original research. In his citation, Lethem mentions a certain "Library of Babel" (Lethem 230). The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about a library containing every single possible combination of letters in books, within which every single possible sentence and thought can be found. Lethem and Fuller would interpret this as a sort of "commons", from which authors can derive inspiration. Rather than attempting to search for a new sentence or thought, it would be more efficient to search through the existing texts for insight. Lethem builds upon this by adding that authors should "ratify the ecstasy of influence" (Lethem 223), or accept that they are deriving from this commons. This is preferable to the avant-grade, which tries to hard to be original. Thus, novelty is not in finding new material, but rather creating new permutations of existing material.
As if to prove this point, Lethem takes this excerpt from Fuller, and combines it with a variety of other essays to form his own take on plagiarism. Very little of this constitutes his own writing, but rather he takes the role of a museum curator, finding different elements that work well together and gluing them together. To Lethem, this is the role of a writer.
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