Critic up to 18 retractions for plagiarism

H. L. Mencken once wrote that “It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.” One wonders what linguistic Hell Mencken would have divined for Robert Cardullo.

Cardullo, a critic with a penchant for plagiarism, has added another retraction to his oeuvre, bringing his total to 18.

As we have reported previously, Cardullo appears to have made a living off the words of his fellow critics. Many of his articles are thinly disguised cut-and-paste jobs from the works of others.  

Cardullo has bounced around academia for years. Last year, the American University of Malta forced him out after only a few weeks on the faculty when charges of plagiarism against him surfaced.

The latest retraction involves an article in the Journal of European Studies, published this January, titled “Antonioni and Bergman, or night and light”. According to the notice:

This article is being retracted for reasons of redundant publication and significant unreferenced overlap with the following previous publications by the above author and publications by other authors:

Cardullo, B (2010) More from Less: The Movie Aesthetic of Michelangelo Antonioni. The Antigonish Review. Issue 160

Cardullo, B (2008) Soundings on Cinema: Speaking to Film and Film Artists. New York: State University of New York Press, Albany

Brody, R (2013) La notte: Modern Love. The Current. Available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2938-la-notte-modern-love

Cowie, P (2003) Winter Light. The Current. Available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/612-winter-light

Also in April, the journal corrected a 2000 essay by Cardullo, “Autumn Interiors, or The Ladies Eve: Woody Allen’s Ingmar Bergman-Complex,” for

unreferenced overlap, particularly on pages 387-391, with an article by the same author, published in Michigan Quarterly Review:

Cardullo, Bert (2000) Latter-Day Bergman: Autumn Sonata as Paradigm. Michigan Quarterly Review Volume XXXIX (4)

Cardullo now appears to be at the University of Kurdistan, according to this 2019 essay in The Explicator on Major Barbara, by George Bernard Shaw. The change of scenery does not seem to have been accompanied by a change in ways, however.

The title of Cardullo’s article is “Transfiguration and Ascent in Shaw’s Major Barbara,” which is awfully similar to this 1986 book chapter by Jane Ann Crum, of the University of North Carolina, titled “Transfiguration and Ascent in Three Plays by George Bernard Shaw.”

And much of the text is nearly identical, too. Oh, and maybe it’s worth noting that Cardullo was the editor of the book, an homage to the critic Stanley Kauffmann.

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