What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
As I've just suggested, students are themselves equally engaged in
trying to own intellectual property. Most notably, they are led to
realize their own subjectivity by establishing their rights to
ownership in the form of property that is commodified into grades
and performance on tests, or even into other measures such as
portfolios, measures that still depend for their efficacy on the
traditional "author" construct and on the notion of knowledge as a
product that can be bartered and traded. The public mania for
testing (as an example of the ways in which ideological discursive
forces are "writing" the public's so-called demand for these tests,
this phenomenon would be hard to beat) of course fuels the fires of
such struggles for student ownership of knowledge. Indeed, by the
time students reach the university, they will necessarily have run
the gauntlet of state-mandated tests as well as the SAT, ACT, and
heaven knows what else. They will have been normed, ranked, queued
up, top to bottom; they will know their places, and occupy them by
virtue of "owning" their particular scores. Within our classrooms,
then, students struggle to own property rights based on the romantic
notion of "author" and to demonstrate that what they own is theirs
alone. In this regard, it is not insignificant that we have, as a
profession, been obsessively concerned with plagiarism, with false
ownership, if you will. (In what I take to be a supreme irony, most
of the plagiarism statements I've looked at seem to be plagiarized
from one another. Example: my efforts in the St. Martin's
Handbook to redefine plagiarism.) Again, only very, very recently
have teachers begun to excavate the deeply repressed and unspoken
formalist, positivist, and individualist ideological assumptions on
which traditional notions of plagiarism rest. As Lisa and I pointed
out in Singular Texts/Plural Authors, and as Becky Howard's work
has further illuminated, contemporary concepts of plagiarism are
fairly new; they grow up, in fact, right alongside the "author"
construct, the intricate system of copyright, and the capitalist
economy in which both are so deeply implicated. I know that the
issue of plagiarism and of its relationship to a complex system of
citation conventions can also be related to the intertextuality defined and explored
by Julia Kristeva, and to the practices of some African and African American language users.
Next *
Previous
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions