There are two ways to get credit for an original contribution in mathematics.
The idea of a PhD, after all, is to make an original contribution to knowledge.
What we try to teach the students is how to make an original contribution in a team".
These are research-based, and a successful PhD student will make an original contribution to the knowledge of their subject.
However, his book "Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form" (1963) was an original contribution to dramatic theory and has been widely discussed.
He praises the BLitt system, as opposed to working for a PhD, "because it cuts free of that 'making an original contribution to knowledge' business.
But, written in an accessible rather than literary style, Song of the Sea is an original contribution to the canon of grief and recovery.
A partial exception is extremist Islam: "Its depiction of western civilisation as a form of idolatrous barbarism is an original contribution to the rich history of Occidentalism".
A. J. Ayer, in his book "Wittgenstein," wrote, "I can think of no one but Elizabeth Anscombe who has made an original contribution to philosophy on the basis of Wittgenstein's teaching".
Once a young scholar's research is taken and published by someone else, he no longer has an original contribution that a university press will accept for publication, and he no longer has the prospect of a career.
A third writer, younger than Puig and Sarduy, who made an original contribution was the Cuban Miguel Barnet, whose Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; Biography of a Runaway Slave) began an entire narrative trend: the so-called "testimonial narrative".
