Houellebecq plagiarism matter: Hegemann reprised?

In response to asserted incidents of plagiarism in his book "La carte et le territoire" (The Map and the Territory) , Michel Houellebecq commented:

"When you use a big word like 'plagiarism', even if the accusation is ridiculous, something (of the accusation) will always remain... It's like racism."

"And if people really think that, then they haven't the first notion of what literature is. That is part of my method."

See also
“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity” including the comment

It is just horrendous to see how unethical this Helene Hagemann is, saying that “it’s not plagiarism, it’s mixing”.

***In listening to discussion about Houellebecq , one thinks back to l'affaire Allison Routman.

Houellebecq matter, from the Independent, I stole from Wikipedia but it's not plagiarism, says Houellebecq -->

Stealing from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is not necessarily plagiarism. It can also be an experimental form of literature. Even a form of "beauty".

This was the angry defence made by the best-selling French novelist Michel Houellebecq this week after allegations that he lifted passages of his latest book from Wikipedia.fr.

Houellebecq, who is the most successful French novelist outside France, does not deny that he copied technical descriptions from the anonymous compilers of Wikipedia. A couple of passages in his acclaimed new novel La Carte et le Territoire were lifted verbatim. They include a description of how flies have sex.


Allison Routman had to walk the plank for copying three sentence fragments from wikipedia:

“when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa”
“German speaking minority outside of Germany”
“who had been released from a concentration camp”

from
Routman's copied lines from wikipedia: enough to walk the plank?

If nothing else, the Houellebecq matter illustrates the complete idiocy of the University of Virginia in handling the Routman affair.