Academic thoughts on copying and plagiarism

[rivkat]

Unless you really want to read detailed thoughts about three academic books on copying and plagiarism, don't go beyond the cut tag -- though I have put in a few fandom-related things when they seemed relevant. This is really more for my reference than anything else (hey, cesperanza, I think you gave me these titles).

Comments

[margueritem]

Hi, we don't know each other, but I felt like commenting:

I found this fascinating. :) I don't have anything to add to what you've said (I haven't read the books, nor have I an informed opinion on this subject).

I just want to thank you for sharing this with everyone.

A few comments:

One big problem with this book is that Gutbrodt rarely makes clear whose beliefs are whose, a serious defect when one is discussing the nested Russian dolls of what critic X thought of critic Y's take on Baudelaire's take on Poe.

I've read books that are like that; they're very frustrating. I think I got the same impression when I was reading (and trying to understand) Gender trouble by Judith Butler: it wasn't always very clear who was saying what and if what was written was the author's opinion or if it was another's, whose name had been mentionned before.

Gutbrodt offers biting criticism of Internet pundits for their nostalgia for a monastic/feudal society with no copyright where every reader can write glosses into a text - he finds it "almost

[rivkat]

Thanks for reading and responding! I think that Gender Trouble is one of the most overvalued books I've ever read. Compared to Butler, Irigaray on Hegel was easy going, and I'm honestly not sure that the effort was repaid in insight, though smart people I respect think differently. There is this problem in academia of people writing only for the three other people (max) who've read all the same stuff they have, without explanations for those of us less familiar with the underlying material. On the other hand, in law, the standard is for each author to recapitulate the field to date in each article, and that has real costs of its own.

[cesperanza]

Thanks for this!!--I loved reading your responses. Hoped these were useful despite their emphasis on literary theory!

[rivkat]

Oh, absolutely! Randall in particular was helpful to me. I probably could have lived without Moraru, but it may also be the case that I shouldn't have read all three together, sort of like running a marathon cold.

My current thinking on originality is that there's truth in both of these statements: (1) poems can only be made of other poems and (2) no man steps into the same river twice, because it's not the same river and he's not the same man. Nothing's new, and everything's new -- a beautiful contradiction.

Meaning

[agarttha]

Your mention of copies of copies and their virtues as copies reminds me of Barthes (Image, Music, Text). In fact, quite a few of the French post-structuralists seem to have engaged with the idea of the original and the 'reproduced', which does not have the same associations as plagiarised, but hints at the difference of meaning between the perception of the original and the reproduced.

Reproducibilty always drags in Benjamin, and the auratic original, and I wonder at the applicability of the concept of aura to text-- for how can one invest the diverse locations, meanings, contexts of any text with an aura traditionally reserved for unicity?((Ugly sentence, that.)

This also reminded me of 'Lost in a Good Book', especially the concept of glossing hypertext and making it text.I ventured into Fforde after reading one of your reviews, and thank you ever so much for that.

[lesbiassparrow]

I don't know you either, but I've enjoyed reading your books reviews and I just had to comment on this as someone who has gone through the horrors of tracking down student plagiarism. I hope you don't mind

Euro-centrism

[agarttha]

You will have to forgive me for my spelling in these posts as my keyboard seems to be acting funny.

I wish to raise the point of the underlying euro-centrism in all these discussions. A discussion of post-colonial theory, or indeed post-colonial writing, does not make the distinction between the centre and the periphery any less acute.

In other 'ancient' traditions, (and I am sorry here for the use of scare quotes,) for example Vedic India, the tradition of Shruti, insists on the use of transmission of texts through an oral tradition that demands non-deviation from the original. Whether or not the concept of plagiarism existed in those societies is debatable-- certainly there seems to be no word in the Sanskrit language system for the concept.

Re: Euro-centrism

[rivkat]

You're right; the traditions these authors discuss are European traditions (and I don't mind scare quotes, as long as they're used in moderation!). One of the troubling issues in dealing with student plagiarism is that the definition is usually so mushy, and when we encounter students whose earlier education was non-American, there can be real clashes in our respective understandings of what a good paper is, including the extent to which one ought to rely on sources.

You wouldn't happen to have a cite for the point about Shruti? I'd love to learn more. (Citation, again. My profession, law, has ridiculously rigid standards; non-text knowledge essentially doesn't exist.)

Re: Euro-centrism

[agarttha]

The shruti tradition itself is based on the understanding that it is shruti that is inviolate when in contradiction to smriti-- rememberance, or textual/scriptural knowledge. To then substantiate the concept of shruti itself through smriti references seems...paradoxical.

You may however find Radhakrishnan,S., Indian Philosophy, Vol.1,1923, useful.

I find SR far too concerned with being interpreted in the/by the West than with the subtleties of his own thinking, and that to me is the primary flaw of Indian writing since Vivekananda. It always seems to be a Lonely Planet guide to Indian Philosophy.

Edward Said's far-too-famous-to-be-taken-seriously Orientalism, also mentions, though indirectly, the cultural and conventional nature of authenticity and merit. You may have read it in the context of your specialism.