Write About Now - Original Copy: Borrowed Voices, Stolen Stories

Literature and art have always relied on quotes, borrowings, and outright embezzlements. How are these practices—made even easier with new technologies—meaningful? Can a story be owned? Is originality an outmoded concept? These issues will be considered by our panelists—American scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan and novelist Victoria Patterson, as well as French writers Yannick Haenel and Laurent Nunez. Yannick Haenel’s book Jan Karski makes a free use of the Polish member of the Resistance movement's testimony of the holocaust to create a hybrid piece between documentary and fiction. Laurent Nunez, in Les Récidivistes, writes a novel in the form of an autobiography using styles and voices of great French writers: Marcel Proust, Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Pascal Quignard. Victoria Patterson is the author of the recently published novel This Vacant Paradise, which is loosely based on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Distinguished cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan is the author of The Googlization of Everything and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity.