i don't think you've done anything wrong, although i'm too sleep-deprived at the moment to articulate where the distinctions are. intent is always a dangerous thing to base an argument on, of course, because some person, somewhere, will always have "not intended" a consequence that the rest of us would have seen coming as though hailed by a welcoming flock of pink flamingoes, or something, but i think that there is a very big difference between purposefully alluding to something and trying to pass it off as your own. there's a very big difference between borrowing wholesale chunks of text vs. snippets of dialogue - and i'd go further to say that it makes a difference if the character uttering the dialogue might reasonably be making a reference on purpose, or not. if rodney mckay makes an off-handed remark about flying being simply throwing yourself at the ground and missing, i'm going to be amused by the reference, not under the impression that the writer is trying to take credit for the line. if rodney gives a 3 minutes speech lifted directly from macbeth, i'm going to be extremely puzzled and fairly certain that the author should have acknowledged the source unless the title of the fic is "atlantis puts on a production of the scottish play." although i suppose even there there is some gray area - a muttered moment of "out out damn spot," depending on context, would probably seem totally fine to me.
the thing is, much of literature is an allusion, one way or another, to something that came before, and we'd have to throw out an awful lot of really good and really famous writing in order to exorcise every un-cited allusion. an allusion, when well done, works less well if it is cited, i think. and so much of literature plays on the reader's expectations of what is "real" and what is "borrowed" - look at eliot's "notes" on the wasteland, for example, which are largely just an exercise in fucking with the reader's mind even further than the wasteland might have already done (not that there's anything wrong with that - i love the wasteland).
i'm rambling, but those are my two, not very articulate, cents.
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Date: 2006-08-08 07:44 pm (UTC)the thing is, much of literature is an allusion, one way or another, to something that came before, and we'd have to throw out an awful lot of really good and really famous writing in order to exorcise every un-cited allusion. an allusion, when well done, works less well if it is cited, i think. and so much of literature plays on the reader's expectations of what is "real" and what is "borrowed" - look at eliot's "notes" on the wasteland, for example, which are largely just an exercise in fucking with the reader's mind even further than the wasteland might have already done (not that there's anything wrong with that - i love the wasteland).
i'm rambling, but those are my two, not very articulate, cents.