plagiarism--the blog version

Well, it took a long arduous weekend and a resulting flu, but the PhD application if on its way. Wish me luck (at this point, I'm not sure whether that means getting in or being rejected). Since I worked such long hours on the writing sample, I have to make sure I get an audience outside of the selection committee, so here is--for your thrills and enjoyment--my plagiarism paper, the blog version.



“We sampled it from them, but it’s not the same baseline. Theirs goes, ‘Ding ding ding dingy ding-ding.’ Ours goes, ‘Ding ding ding ding dingy ding-ding.’ That little bitty change. It’s not the same.” --Vanilla Ice


"I changed the beginning and the end. It's a completely different story."--Anonymous Student


"We live in an intertextual world, not as a postmodern literary conceit but as a matter of practical reality."--Perry Share



What's the line between intertextuality and plagiarism? Consider Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland:



And its visual homage, Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen:



I use this example all of the time in my children's lit class. What makes Sendak's use of McCay's design and thematic elements a legitimate example of intertextuality & not plagiarism?

Plagiarism is Tricky.


1. Easy example of plagiarism: the purchased paper.

WRONG

What about ghost writing? Smart, busy, important people pay someone else to write for them all the time. The paper mills use these arguments: "How can I attend ballet rehearsal? I'm two days short of my paper deadline." The "completely non-plagiarized" papers are the perfect solution for the over-scheduled, overworked student.

2. Not-so-easy example: Appropriation, no citation.

If we can't even rely on the eternal and essential evils of the purchased paper, what happens when we encounter the lesser evils of plagiarism? If sources are referenced or quoted, they should always be carefully and thoroughly cited. What about this?



From Sophie Matisse's series Be Back in Five Minutes. Poor DaVinci doesn't even get his name mentioned.



3. Not-so-easy example 2: Patchwriting

Cutting and pasting, weaving in one's own words--that's getting closer. The writer is trying to make sense of the text, incorporate the sources. But the patchwritten text still isn't where it needs to be. Or is it?

What about Jonathan Lethem's 2007 Harper's pastiche?

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere expect the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperment, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

I like what he has to say here, but none of it's his. He weaves together Barthes, Twain, Emerson. And he doesn't even admit it until the end, where he writes:

This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I ‘wrote’ (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.

Because he felt like it? Well, it works for me.


Outside of our teaching lives, we all recognize and accept that texts are used and reused and that plagiarism is big and flexible and indefinable. But in the classroom, we take the rigid view, believing that plagiarism "hurts the inquirer, who has avoided thinking independently and has lost the opportunity to participate in broader social conversations” (wpa statement on plagiarism). We even take a bit of pleasure when we catch the little buggers.


But our students also know that plagiarism is big and flexible and indefinable. They see it every day. All the sampling, mash-ups, parodies--it can seem like a textual free-for-all.

But there are rules. Take DJ Spooky aka that subliminal kid, who warns against "too much citation, not enough synthesis." Sounds like advice I might give my students.


Conclusion: Think rhetorical, not ethical. Use the textual practices outside of academia to explore the uses of text inside of academia.


And now, all of your plagiarism practices have been solved.