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'All aesthetics of appropriation entail acts of transgression predicated on the art of citational writing, from allusion to punning, quotation, pastiche, parody, sampling, remix and homage. ‘ωitational writing underscores the double movement of quotation,’ writes Della Pollock in a now famous paper on performativity (Pollock 1998:94), affirming that ‘it stages its own citationality, re-sighting citation, displaying it in an accumulation of quotations or self quotations ... with the primary effect of reclaiming citation for affiliation’ (Pollock 1998: 94) my emphasis). As such, aesthetics of appropriation presuppose the existence of both Other and other and cannot be deemed nihilistic as has often been suggested, especially in the context of critiques of postmodernism. Notwithstanding their intent, aesthetics of appropriation tacitly attribute to language both an evocative and communicatory dimension. But what lies beyond the drive for ‘affiliation’ intimated by Pollock? ‘Crimes of letters: the crow, the fox and me’ explores the kinship between textuality and felony—real or imagined—within the authorised context of the reader-response contract, however misprisioned. The wager of this ‘creative artful fact,’ otherwise called artefact, is for ‘authorised theft’ to exceed what one might be reluctant to call ‘original’ material after Harold Bloom returned the course of philological forays into textual begetting back to anxieties of influence (Bloom 1973).'
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