As an English teacher overseas, I had to warn my students of the dangers of plagiarism lest they suffer the consequences. My warnings failed to stop a few lazy students from using the old copy-paste trick and pilfering paragraphs from a wide variety of sites around the net. Usually, a quick Google was all it took in order to catch the alleged plagiarizers. I know that plagiarism is a big issue in the United States, but don’t have much of an idea of how it is perceived in France where a French novelist allegedly plagiarized some passages in his novel directly from Wikipedia.

Slate.fr (which is the French arm of Slate) is accusing French novelist Michel Houellebecq of plagiarizing  a minimum of three passages (and possibly more?) from his novel La carte et le territoire from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Michel Houellebecq has admitted that he copy/pasted from Wikipedia and defended his work in a rather unusual way- he claims that he wishes that his plagiarism would have been more direct than it was and that he admires this style as a literary device. He actually said, “I rework the text a bit to make it closer to my own style. … I'd like to be able to modify them a little less than I do.”

French law is a little murky on the copyright issue in this case- it is illegal to use unattributed text from an encyclopedia, but the author of Wikipedia’s text is not technically Wikipedia, so it is unlikely that Houellebecq could get into trouble for his plagiarism and rather creative use of the copy/paste commands.

Heouellebecq is not the first European writer to be caught plagiarizing this year- earlier this year,  17-year-old Helene Hegemann was caught plagiarizing in her novel Axolotl Roadkill from a less popular novel written by a person using a pseudonym. Hegemenn used at least an entire passage from the other novel and several elements of the original novel were incorporated into her work.

Hegemann’s defense of the alleged plagiarism was similar to that of Houellebecq’s- she claims that the use of many materials as sources just shows that she is a product of her generation- not that she is a plagiarizer. Despite the controversy surrounding her novel, the book was still nominated for a prestigious award and remained on the German best-seller lists.