ABSTRACT
To adapt a famous statement by W.E.B. DuBois, a major problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the quote line: the relation between the older and the newer versions of a text or cultural product, between source and quotation, original and copy, the content we consume and the content we produce. True, Ecclesiastes sounded the warning thousands of years ago that “there is nothing new under the sun,” and literature has from its inception been woven together from the shreds and patches of earlier works. Virgil reworked Homer, Shakespeare filched from Ovid, Plutarch, and Holin-shed; the history of literature is a long narrative of borrowings, echoings, and thefts. In the twentieth century, many writers and artists went another step: they forcefully rejected the Romantic concept of “genius” and musty, outdated notions of originality, inspiration, and heroic creativity, and invented radical new ways of appropriating and recycling pre-existing forms of expression.
