Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality

But is it original? The question, on which so much of writing stakes its claim to greatness, may be more interesting than the answer. In this provocative book, Francoise Meltzer takes a subtle and incisive look at the anxiety of origins at the heart of the literary enterprise. Using four case studies, Meltzer reveals the shaky status of originality as a founding principle of the critical establishment. Three dreams were the starting point for Descartes's famous methode. In the short shrift given to these nightly visions by the author of The Interpretation of Dreams, Meltzer sees a symptom of Freud's overwhelming anxiety about originality and authorship, an obsession that mirrors Descartes's own fear of plagiarism. Turning next to the Holocaust poet Paul Celan, who was actually accused of plagiarism by another poet's widow, Meltzer takes us through the minority discourse on the European Jew - in which "the Jew" is seen as having no homeland except for the text - to show us why such an accusation was so devastating for Celan. The question of originality becomes even trickier in the case of Colette, whose early books were published under her husband Willy's name. Scrutinizing Willy's elaborate promotion of himself as a serious writer, unlike his "lazy" wife, Meltzer questions our investment in the working notion of a writer, and in the way that notion is gendered. Finally she considers the case of Walter Benjamin, whose early interpreters, especially Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, challenged his seriousness and originality by alluding to his supposed 'feminine' qualities of vagabondage and sloth. In each of these cases, Meltzer shows how a threat to a writer's status as creator betraysthe larger fraud of the originality myth itself. Fascinating for its insights into the ways originality is both at risk and at work in Western literary culture, Hot Property will engage all those who have an interest in questions of authorship, textual sovereignty, and the legitimacy of the critical establishment.