So, it appears that Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarized large portions of her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life from a multitude of other books written in the same generic genre, teen-fiction. Passages with the similarities have been published in a multitude of outlets, and the case seems to be pretty concrete that she did not do this by accident, as she claimed by saying it was a totally "unconscious" effort on her part. To me, this seems to be suggesting that she reproduced these passages simply due to her ability to retain the bland, pedestrian text that fills nearly every novel. That's striking to me because what one generally remembers about a text is those passages that are truly memorable and stand alone not those that serve as traditional transition devices or engines that move the plot forward.

For the most part, she's been tried and convicted by the media, but Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting defense on his blog which he later revised to some extent. Basically, he wrote that teen-fiction is a genre that, like any other genre, adheres to basic conventions and that it was almost impossible to imagine a book in this genre without these passages. His point is illustrated in this passage:

When Doris Kearns Goodwin borrowed, without attribution, from a history of the Kennedys for her history of the Kennedys, that's serious. She's a scholar. And we have an expectation of scholarship that it is supposed to reflect original thought. We have no such expectation for genre novels, Harlequin romances, slasher films, pornos, or, say, the diaries of teenagers.

He also states, "Let's just say this isn't the first twenty lines of Paradise Lost." And, like I said, the examples chronicled are pretty generic in nature. There are definite similarities, and it does look really bad for her as an author to simply reword the writing of others to fill out her work, but they are simple passages, not entire plot devices or the entire narrative, other than the fact that it's about a young girl coming of age, which in and of itself is such a generic plot that it's hard to imagine anyone who is able to distinguish between any of these numerous works. They're all the same to some extent.

So, it's here where I admit that I don't care for teen-fiction. Why would I? I'm not a teacher, and they provide no nostalgia for me as a reader looking to revisit my past. But that's beside the point. What I actually find interesting about this controversy is that what Gladwell is addressing in his entry is that there are genre conventions that are so stereotypical and that appear in nearly every example of that genre and people do not bat an eye. Gladwell errs by confining his critique to this aspect alone and not addressing the idea that the passages are simply reworded from other texts. Sure, most of these books will contain base descriptions of events and they are so common that it would be absurd to cry plagiarism each and every time this occurs. His point isn't lost, though, and it makes for interesting food for thought when you consider the idea of how plagiarism actually works.

Just like James Frey, Viswanathan has had her publishing deals voided but unlike him her work was pulled from the shelves, which makes you wonder why one deserved a note inserted in the front detailing that much of it might not be true and the other pulled completely off the shelf. There's probably no controversy there, but someone might make something of it. Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that the books isn't an original work, which is what people are expecting.