Talk:Steven Millhauser

message: I am DEEPLY disturbed at this false labelling of the Steven Millhuaser article as plagiarized.
I am a college professor, longtime scholar of Millhauser's novels, and I wrote the entire original version of the article myself; every word is my own.  The only quote in the article, where Millhauser replied, in response to being asked whether the Pulitzer Prize would change his life, "I dare it to."  This was a quote widely reported in the press at the time (TIME magazine, the New York Times, and others will verify this) and it is attributed as a quote, and it is brief and well within  fair use.
The sites listed as sources for the article are in fact sites which have quoted, without acknowledgement, from the wikipedia article.  The article was started by me in 2005 (the quoted material is from the first paragraph, there from the start) and has been around long enough that evidently both Powell's Books and the Dalkey Archive Press found it, and found it worth quoting.
Whoever marked this as a copyright violation should have looked further into the case.  Can anyone mark an article as such?  Is this person an administrator?  Shouldn't the protocol be to contact the main author(s) of the article?  I wish there were a much clearer process to speedily adjuducate such claims.  
I have been an admirer of Millhauser's works for 20 years and spent many hours crafting a good article, which was then edited and added to by a small number of devoted wikipedians.  Nothing in the article in any way violates any copyright; all of the text is original, and even the most cursory examination of the sources would show that the wikipedia text is the common ancestor of both the phrases on Powell's and those at the Dalkey Archive Press.
I have spent, by my own estimate, some 200 hours contributing to wikipedia, and have until now enjoyed the process. I have not only contributed articles but have released several of my own photographs into the creative commons license just so they could be used freely on wikipedia.
This kind of too-quick labelling of an article of mine as plagiarized is tremendously disheartening, and makes me want to never contribute again.  The services
of thoughtful hardworking people who are central to keeping the wikipedia accurate will be hard to obtain, I should think, if the wikepedia's adminsitrators so carelessly label their work as copyright infringement with no substantive basis.
I did read what you left in and I can easily object to the paragraph which I did not write in the critical section, it is all wrong.  First, the influence which is utterly central of Borges must be mentioned, Millhauser is mostly writing a footnote to the Libarary of Babel and is LEAST interesting here.  Secondly, the permutations grow and grow but and then explode into numerical chaos (a bigger mall, a museum with more rooms, etc.), certainly, but the whole bit about how Millhauser then returns to "minimalism" is just dead wrong.  Often the piece ends with just chaos, for instance, and if there is some suggestion that the artist, the true artist, will start all again, this isn't postmodern but really biographical.  What is going on is the artist is REJECTED, maybe some for hubris and a distain for the commercial, but more likely because the audience is insufferably common and fickle, and all the artists great plans (read Morpheus again and again) go to nothing ... and he HAS TO go to the minor leagues, short-stories.  Again, the critic here is trying for something very postmodern in feel, but this is really just biography.  Millhauser is not interested in any Big Bang theory of life, either, though he needs some narrative line.  The artist starts, the artist achieves success, the artist fails -- that's the narrative and space and time have nothing really much to do with anything except some stuff stolen from Borges.      —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.195.135.240 (talk) 17:11, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article NOT plagiarized 

message: Having looked at the Powell's Books site, I believe that the text in question is that which reads:
"Steven Millhauser is perhaps one of modern American fiction's most elusive characters ..."
That line is a QUOTE from my article.  Has no one considered the possibility that the Powell's web author quoted from the wikipedia?
Many people quote the wikipedia without attribution, which, in the sense of the wiki's goals, should be totally kosher, I believe (though the source should have been noted).  However, what is to prevent anyone who is checking the wikipedia for originality to, having seen a quote elsewhere, suddenly ban the wikipedia article as plagiarized??  This, it seems to me,  is very likely to become an increasingly serious issue over time,
Professor Russell A. Potter Profrap 23:57, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Text in question 

message: I just removed the sentence 'His most recent publication, "History of a Disturbance," is in the March 5, 2007 issue of The New Yorker.' Because it's no longer true. The item was added 10 days ago, and his most recent publication is now "The Wizard of West Orange" in the April Harper's Magazine. Until next week, or next month, or whenever his next story appears in Granta or Tin House or The Kenyon Review or wherever. And maybe someone won't notice the next time that the "most recent publication" has become outdated. It seems to me that trying to keep an encyclopedic article updated like a breaking news story just increases the chances that the article will include inaccurate information. --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 15:09, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed!  I just got the latest Harper's, and was going to do the same thing.  Doubtless, as has happened in the past, Mr. Millhauser's stories will shortly be collected in book form, and *that* would be the time to update the list of works in this entry. Rapotter 17:57, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Just to play the devil's advocate against myself...We could, as a compromise or alternative, add a section under the "Published works" head, and call it "Recent uncollected stories", without any assertion that the latest story listed is necessarily the absolute latest story in print. When Millhauser's next story collection is published, the section could be cleared out and restarted. This would serve the purpose of providing reasonably up-to-date information—which is one thing Wikipedia can do that a paper reference can't—without introducing time-contingent errors of fact. --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 17:59, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "His most recent publication" 

message: I think it absurd for you to add footnotes to "substantiate" my critical points, seeing how the notes bear no relationship to what I'm writing.  The interview you are quoting in footnote 8, which I didn't know existed even, is particularly not what I would support, authors notoriously bad critics of their own writing.  But this interview finds Millhauser really being dishonest also, more troubling.  So, he speaks of the added power of a "we" narrator over a mere "I" in relation to "The Knife Thrower" (he uses this person in other stories as well, like "Sisterhood"), but the opposite is true, the "we" narrator has no power at all, he is a low-mimetic ironically undercut idiot for the purpose of elevating the other "we," the audience of readers.  Earlier stories have an authorative and omniscient narrator who has a special relationship to an artist, a real artist (like August or Eisenstein).  These narrators mock the non-creative inferior audience, really the same audience that the "we" represents.  But this narrator by implication is also linking the reader with this audience, since the reader is not priviledged to the artist, the narrator is superior by this alone.  Anyway, Millhauser is essentially changing as he gets older, ingratiating the reader (The New Yorker kind of reader, who is anti-porn and anti-violence, and who would easily reject the audience in The Knife Thrower and the undercut narrator), rather than holding the artist (and himself) above the mere reader and audience.  The "we" narrator has no authority, it is unreliable and the opposite of what Millhauser is saying.  There are many other distortions in the interview, but I am pointing this one out because I did not put the footnote in and hadn't even read the interview when I wrote the paragraph, and completely disown it.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.195.135.240 (talk) 15:03, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Footnote 8 

message: I've restored some deleted text which had been used with a (mis)attribution to another encyclopedia site. It turned out to be a quote from a much earlier version of the WP's own article.  Since that earlier version is now online with attribution at a stable URL from an academic site, I marked the text as direct quotation and cited the author's site. Clevelander96 (talk) 00:13, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Attributed passage 

message: Here are a couple of places where we could start an account of Millhauser criticism:
Chénetier, Marc, Steven Millhauser : la précision de l'impossible. Paris : Belin, 2003.
Sheridan, David, "The End of the World: Closure in the Fantasies of Borges, Calvino, and Millhauser" In: Iftekharrudin, Boyden, Longo, and Rohrberger(eds.) Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story. Westport, CT: Praeger; 2003
Kinzie, Mary, "Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser." Salmagundi, 1991 Fall; 92: 115-44.
May I suggest: most of the Spring 2006 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The introductory essay surveys the critical reception (among other things) of Millhauser's publications up to 2005, and contains a Works Cited list of more than 80 entries (including many reviews of Millhauser's work, both popular and scholarly). The issue also includes three extended critical essays on, respectively, Millhauser's novella "Revenge," theatrical audience in Millhauser, and the novel Martin Dressler. A bit surprising no one has mentioned this source. Publication info is readily available via MLA bibliography.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Latterinabarn (talk • contribs) 22:27, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sources for new section on Critical reception 

message: I have commenced a tidy-up of the Bibliography section using cite templates and tables for short stories, poems and/or book reviews. Capitalization and punctuation follow standard cataloguing rules in AACR2 and RDA, as much as Wikipedia templates allow it. ISBNs and other persistent identifiers, where available, are commented out, but still available for reference. Feel free to continue. Sunwin1960 (talk) 07:41, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bibliography