Wednesday, March 05, 2008

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.

7 comments:

Lisa B. said...

I am so very very glad to have this. It does, truly, answer all my questions. Can I propose that we just do away with the "p" word? I'm sick of it, and I think the gist of your paper (correct me if I'm wrong . . .) is that there's no such thing? So why even keep the word, you know? It's so over.

middlebrow said...

How about thinking rhetorically and ethically?

Lisa B: "Its so over." Really?

I actually agree with the gist of Assertively Unhip's argument here. We should emphasize synthesis over citation, and there's obviously a big gray area between using something (building on what someone else has done) and stealing. And as you also know I'm no Turnitin.com freak. But certainly plagiarism still exists; we should still address academic honesty.

Lisa B. said...

Gosh, mb. I was *kidding*. Chillax!

middlebrow said...

Shoot, my bad. I gotta get past this defense lisa b. I'm too much in diss mode. This world is too much with me.
Sorry.

I need to go back to posting Vanilla Ice lyrics.

lis said...

I still think there is plagiarism, but that it's different within academic contexts than it is anywhere else. So, we should talk about plagiarism within the narrow context of academic expectations. Call it a matter of ethics or academic dishonesty, as long as that discussion of ethics is grounded within a rhetorical framework.

Unknown said...

One corollary to the rhetorical/ethical frameworks, is that the rhetorical framework is a fully consistent system to judge the quality of a work. A plagiarized or patchwritten piece is simply a clumsy synthesis without much originality. Hence, the offender still gets an F. In a sense, the rhetorical framework plays the good cop to the ethical framework bad cop.

Counterintuitive said...

You're in as far as I'm concerned--that's a great piece of writing. And I agree that we should discuss plagiarism in the narrow academic sense with students. But I also think we should discuss, as your piece brings out, how creative *near* plagiarism can be--the pastiche, the mash-up, parody. Too often it seems we teachers avoid naming and discussing this rhetorical move with students afraid that we may create, to use your phrase, a textual free for all.