Plagiarism

According to Rutgers' policy of academic integrity, plagiarism is the "use of another person’s words, ideas, or results without giving that person appropriate credit. To avoid plagiarism, every direct quotation must be identified by quotation marks or appropriate indentation and both direct quotation and paraphrasing must be cited properly according to the accepted format for the particular discipline or as required by the instructor in a course," (Academic Integrity Policy, 2A). The definition is concrete, and without exceptions. There is a sense of there always being a clear line of plagiarism vs not plagiarism. This differs from how Lethem uses the term. He believes that plagiarism, to some degree, is unavoidable. Nabokov's Lolita may have unconsciously been inspired by Lichberg's story. They were published forty years apart, and Nabokov had lived in Berlin the time Lichberg's story was published. On page 225 Lethem says, "all ideas are secondhand, consciously and consciously drawn from a million outside sources...by necessity, by proclivity, and by delight we all quote." Lethem's states there is no originality, but people perceive their work to be original because they do not know where the ideas came from.