By RANDY KENNEDY

The popular conception of the creative writer is still by and large one of the individual trying to wrestle language, maybe even the meaning of life, from his soul.

Maybe that’s one reason for the flurry of attention recently about a teenage German novelist, Helene Hegemann, whose book about Berlin’s club scene was named a finalist for a prestigious literary prize to be awarded March 18 in Leipzig. After a blogger and fellow novelist announced that Ms. Hegemann had blended sizeable chunks of his own writing into hers, Ms. Hegemann, instead of following the script of contrition and retraction so familiar in recent years, announced that appropriating the passages from that book and other sources was her plan all along.

A child of a media-saturated generation, she presented herself as a writer whose birthright is the remix, the use of anything at hand she feels suits her purposes, an idea of communal creativity that certainly wasn’t shared by those from whom she borrowed. In a line that might have been stolen from Sartre (it wasn’t) she added: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

The news made waves in the United States just before the publication of a highly anticipated book by David Shields, “Reality Hunger,” a feisty literary “manifesto” built almost entirely of quotations from other writers and thinkers. The borrowed words are marshaled to make a case against what Mr. Shields sees as boring fiction and in favor of genre-bending forms like the lyric essay.

Mr. Shields argues that blatant borrowing has been a foundation of culture since long before Terence complained in the second century B.C. that “there’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.” Appropriation has breathed life into music, art and theater, he argues, and he includes writers like Sterne, Emerson, Eliot and Joyce to make the case that it has been an important tradition in writing, too.

But it has been a limited one, viewed with even greater suspicion now. And Mr. Shields, so firmly in the camp that sees appropriation as just another kind of collaboration, laments that expressive writing has lagged behind the other arts in using appropriation as a tool, especially in an age when the most vital artists are those “breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their works.”

Mr. Shields’s book relies on thinkers from Wittgenstein to DJ Spooky, melding them into a voice that can sound at times eerily consistent. He contends that in a world where the death of the novel has been announced with great regularity for almost half a century, such an open-source approach is the only way to keep literature alive. Even the most original-seeming writing borrows from the centuries of writing that came before, so why not simply be more honest and, he suggests, maybe do something more interesting in the process?

“So much of the energy of great work to me is feeling the echo effect on every line, of not knowing where it came from,’’ he said, citing a quote - this one attributed - from Graham Greene that he uses as one of the book’s epigraphs: “When we are not sure we are alive.”