I think Stallybrass means it is ridiculous to assume that great works come out of nowhere, with nothing preceding them. He believes thoughts originate from outside sources. What he hints at is the idea that creativity and good work is a synthesis of things you have experienced – thus things that have not originated in you yourself. The plagarism scare that is currently consuming a lot of the college/academic world, in his opinion, is inherently baseless because good ideas, and ideas in general, build on each other. They don’t just exist in free space. This is important to our research project because we are going to be investigating a lot of different sources on one topic, and we will be incorporating all those sources into a hopefully new idea. This process makes us conform to Stallybrass’ approach to writing.