Allusion and plagiarization

[azurelunatic]

If I should make a passing reference in a scholarly paper about putting pearls before swine, or being bounded in a nutshell, a casual reader would see the literary allusion, get my meaning, and pass on to the rest of the paper.

If I should mention that our narrator was particularly regretful at the helmsman's death, and mention that the spear in the Other's heart is the spear in your own, a casual reader might think that those were my words. A not-so-casual English teacher might bring me up before the Dean on plagiarization charges, as I'd just made an uncited reference to the words of Surak via Diane Duane.

The difference? Publicity. Almost everyone in the English-speaking scholarly world knows the Bible and Shakespeare. Not everyone knows Spock's World; not everyone had that book as more influential than the above two bodies of work in their teenage years. I can cite Surak on a number of fronts, and don't think anything of it.

Comments

[kdorian.livejournal.com]

If one uses quotation marks to make it clear that one is quoting, even if the quotation is not attributed, is it still plagiarism? I speak here of casual writing, obviously, not something more formal like a school paper or some such.

[azurelunatic]

Obviously not.

I guess I just have to train myself to use the quotation marks, even if it's a paraphrase. Because I know it's not my phrasing, and it seems sufficiently obvious to me...

[juuro.livejournal.com]

And where do we define the line? Which proportion of the intended audience needs to be familiar with a work for the work to be alluded to? Is the intended audience the correct sampling space, or should the benchmark be the cultural peers of the author?

How do we distinguish plagiarism in the form of two or three expressions in a paper from the creative work of a nimble mind that happens to coincide with a previously published work? Dig long enough, and almost every phrase has already been used somewhere. It is especially hard to create really new figures of speech.

How do we distinguish plagiarism in the form of two or three expressions in a paper from the unconscious recollection of something that was read but cannot be actively recalled?