Plagiarism
is a vexed and vexing issue, if we are to judge solely by the amount
of rhetoric generated by this issue in the popular media, among
educators, and in scholarly articles across a variety of fields.
Plagiarism is considered a widespread and growing problem, made
easier by information technologies such as the Internet, which allow
for easy research and source retrievaland an easy way to cut
and paste without attribution. The problem is believed to add to
faculty workload, disrupt the learning process and undermine the
nature and value of education itself. Solutions range from the pedagogicaladvocating
"process" methods and teacher overview of draft preparationto
the technologicalsubscribing to software such as Turnitin.com,
which uses custom algorithms to compare student papers to the Web
and other text databases.
Despite
the time, energy and resources dedicated to prevention, surveillance
and adjudication, however, little work has been done that attempts
to dissect the meanings conveyed by "plagiarism." Instead,
much of the instructional literature on plagiarism assumes that
notions of academic honesty and the citation conventions meant to
reflect that ethical grounding are based on universal traditions.
It implies that while procedures for recognizing attribution may
differ stylistically across disciplines, they derive from a shared,
even natural, understanding of authorship, ownership and the construction
of knowledge in the academy. My paper claims, on the other hand,
that there is very little that can be called "common"
about our common sense understanding of these issues. A closer look
at the history, rhetorical uses and cultural practices of plagiarism
reveals that this concept is actually quite complex, riddled with
contradictions and blindspots. I will also examine why plagiarism
has become a site around which multiple anxious meanings proliferate,
looking at the ways the discourse of plagiarism is ultimately a
symptomatic response to perceived threats to textual circulation,
regulation and the production of knowledge.
The
Problem of/with Plagiarism
Certainly,
there is a perception within universities that incidents of student
plagiarism are increasing. Anecdotal evidencehallway chatteris
one unreliable source fueling notions of this rise: as more attention
is paid to the issue, educators become more suspicious, questioning
papers they used to let pass. Then, thanks to their increased ability
to verify cases, using the web or other databases, they find what
they seek. This, of course, only increases their suspicions, as
well as that of their colleagues to whom they voice their complaints,
and the cycle continues.
It
may seem that more objective evidence could shed light into the
darkness of subjective analyses , yet recent statistics about the
pervasiveness of student plagiarism actually tend to complicate
rather than clarify the problem. These reports are undermined by
that fact that there is a question of what exactly is being discusseda
definitional problem casts doubt on accuracy. As I will show, educators
are divided on what exactly constitutes plagiarism, so we cannot
expect students to bring a singular definition to their responses.
Recent reports, for example, suggest that anywhere from 45% to 80%
of high school students admit to cheating, while some 15% to 54%
say that have plagiarized from a website. The wide variation itself
in the number of cheating and plagiarizing students "discovered"
by various surveys suggests that the wording of the question has
shaped the response. Further, the discrepancy between cheating rates
and plagiarism rates indicates that some students do not consider
plagiarism to be cheating, or that they do not consider what they
are doing to be plagiarism. Indeed, in a 2003 survey conducted by
Rutgers University professor Donald L. McCabe, approximately half
the students declared that they did not think it was cheating to
copy up to an entire paragraph from the Web.
Granted,
most of their teachers are pretty confident that this last does
indeed constitute plagiarism. Even among educators, however, plagiarism
is seldom as straightforward an issue as they may believe. In the
simplest terms, plagiarism is the use, in any public work of writing,
art, programming, data collection, etc, of anothers written
language without acknowledgement of the original source. Any sort
of blatant fraudsuch as downloading or purchasing an entire
term paper or article and presenting this as ones own workis
generally reviled as an extreme form of dishonesty. It is also usually
considered plagiarism to include in ones paper any literal
word-for-word copying of any length when the originary source is
not acknowledged, even, in some cases, when the originary source
is ones own paper for another class. Plagiaristic practices
can also, but dont always, include the failure to provide
attribution when presenting anothers conceptions or ideas,
whether paraphrasing or summarizing. This is complicated by the
fact that what is considered "common knowledge"which
usually does not need to be citedvaries from discipline to
discipline, among student levels within a discipline, and among
individual students at each level. Sometimes, using quotation marks
but not citations, or listing sources only at the end of a paper,
without providing appropriate attribution within the text, may be
considered plagiarism, though this might also be more accurately
called improper citation. This last reminds us that the issue of
intentionalitydifficult to prove or denycomplicates
definitional approaches all the more.
The
academy is not alone in its confusion about how to define plagiarism.
Accusations of plagiarism against prominent figures such as civil
rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., historian Doris Kearns Goodwin,
fiction writer Yann Martel, and New York Times reporter Jayson Blair
reveal how complex, how contested, and how micro-culturally biased
representations of unattributed "recycled" writing may
be. All these writersworking in diverse settings with disparate
norms, values and expectations governing the texts they producedhad
detractors and proponents, and in each case, a variety of issues
were brought forward that were not, superficially at least, related
to plagiarism itself. The King controversy, for example has been
used as ammunition by conservative forces in arguments about academic
political correctness and the so-called "cultural wars."
Attempts to understand Kings unattributed source use as part
of the African-American oral homiletic tradition were seen as a
cover-up, or one more case of special privileges being offered to
protected minorities. Goodwins year-long media brouhaha elicited
comments about academic research techniques, the role of the popular
historian, sexist double-standards among historians, and the nature
of media scandals themselves. Martels case engendered debate
over literary prizes, the post-colonial appropriation of discourse,
the inspirational sources of fiction, and (again) the nature of
media scandals themselves. Finally, Blairs "outing"
shook the foundations of an august news source, raised questions
about newsroom management technique, and called into question affirmative
action hiring practices. The very fact that each incident seems
inseparable from topics not directly related to the unregulated
repetition of written texts shows the difficulty in defining plagiarism
in and of itself. It is a topic that can only ever be understood
through its context, embedded as it is in a variety of other cultural
discourses, and deployed for certain interests.
Despite
this variety, Blairs case itself reveals one of the most common
patterns in the rhetoric of plagiarism. While the term plagiarism
was bandied about freely in descriptions of his transgressions,
few reports noted that in the actual accusationreleased in
a detailed listing by the Times itselfmost of the offenses
were variations of deception. The few examples actually labeled
as "plagiarism" were a sentence or shorter, and were mostly
lifted interview quotes. Since Blair did give credit to the "author"
of these quotesthe person being interviewedthough not
the person eliciting and transcribing these quotes into a story,
"plagiarism" seems an odd indictment, not nearly as apropos
as the factual errors and "whereabouts" fabrications of
which he was also accused. Clearly, Blair did violate several journalistic
codes of conduct, including the norms of treating other reporters
work. However, it also seems that in his case "plagiarismin
its most ambiguous and slippery sense" is being found,
again, only because it is being sought. It is being deployed, moreover,
precisely because of its juridical associations and the moral-ethical
capital it conveys. This protects the Times, and journalism more
broadly, by pointing to plagiarism as an individual rather than
institutional issue: the paper paid lip service to "being responsible"
for Blair, but only in the sense of an editorial "chain of
command" made up of other individualsnot as a larger
culture supporting a regime of writing that might lead logically
to the very practices they purport to abhor. Thus, the Blair case
illustrates that despite the colloquial use of "stealing"
as a synonym for "plagiarizing," it is a crime not of
property as much as proprietyin other words, plagiarism is
a violation of that which is considered proper, in good taste, and
conforming to a sense of decency in accordance with micro-cultural
norms. Indeed, plagiarism is used to buttress whatever the local
text customs may be, in the service of the textual ideology that
supports those.
But
how local is custom? Even among educators alone, the understanding
of the issues surrounding plagiarism may vary according to ones
theoretical, methodological or ideological framework. In reviewing
the plentiful literature on this topic, which varies from books
and published articles to instructional handouts and "how-to-avoid"
websites and videos, I have been able to divide the academic rhetoric
of plagiarism into several categories that describe practitioners
understanding of and approach to the issue. These "schools
of thought" vary widely in their assumptions about the causes
and effects of plagiarism, as well as their understanding of the
technologies, cultural norms and sites of writing that generate
and regulate textual circulation. However, each view has in common
that it draws on a particular notion of historyspecifically,
the histories of authorship, the literary market, intellectual property
law or plagiarism itselfto support its claims about the present.
Plagiarism
and Tradition
One
of the many approaches toward plagiarism might be called "traditionalist."
This academic subculture utilizes a "common sense" or
mainstream understanding of plagiarism that is believed to be based
in deeply rooted and shared cultural traditions. It is apparent
in so-called "classic" popular works such as Thomas Mallons
Stolen Words as well as in works by such respected literary historians
as Christopher Ricks; indeed, some surveys suggest that most university
faculty support this view. Discussions of plagiarism utilizing this
approachwhich includes most university policiescall
on perceptions of universal moral standards in casting all sorts
of plagiarism as cheating or deception, in contrast to "honest
source use." Many of these policies thus fail to distinguish
between types of plagiarism or the differing conventions governing
writing tasks. They also do not factor in intentionalitywhether
or not a student writer purposely sets out to deceive his or her
teachersor deficiencies in understanding the norms of source
use. Indeed, policies governing plagiarism are often found under
codes of academic integrity, honesty, dishonesty, misconduct, or
other morally-laden terms, all of which serve to make this clearly
and essentially an issue of individual ethics. Because this approach
decries plagiarism as fundamentally and unequivocally transgressive,
equivalent to theft or at best deceit, it often uses extreme language
in describing it: Pappas, for example, calls plagiarism a "form
of cheating and . . . an act of mendacity," and labels the
plagiarist a "two-bit thug" (30); Timothy Noahs
Slate.com article on the Goodwin scandal is titled, pointedly, "Doris
Kearns Goodwin, Liar" and is accompanied by this depiction
of a physical theft:
This
group also worries that this sort of cheating is becoming an acceptable
part of the student culture of high schools and colleges. Conservative
cultural critics such as Theodore Pappas place the blame for this
attitude on permissive parenting, fuzzy social values and the moral
relativism engendered by the "liberal academy." Even the
National Review has found it necessary to weigh in on this issue
recently, to once more sound the drum beat that universities are
filled with "French-bathed barbarians in pursuit of destroying
Western Civilization" (Goldberg, n.p.). Pappas is representative
of a larger group, then, when he links what is in his view a dangerous
redefinition of plagiarism to postmodernism and deconstructionism,
and,
their
nefarious offspringmulticulturalism, cultural relativism,
political correctness and their many manifestations, from sensitivity
seminars and diversity training to the war of defamation on the
cultural inheritance of old Europe, on the Anglo-American traditions
of our country, and on white Western males and their achievements
in general. (24)
Such
recent interlopers are seen to be disrupting a long humanistic history
of fighting tradition. Ricks asserts in a lecture to the British
Academy that while their may be "grey areas" (22) in which
adjudication is difficult, the definitionand the moral ramifications
of that definitionis stark and simple. He dates this obvious
view of plagiarism to at least the first century A.D. and Martials
epigrams. Any critics who offer counter-examples are merely excusing
with "exculpatory bonhomie" (36) the crimes of past writers,
a move Ricks sees as fundamentally immoral in itself. He ignores
the ways in which all the terms he useswriting, authorship,
copyinghave fundamentally morphed along with the media and
communication contexts supporting these.
Plagiarism
and Technology
Another
approach to plagiarism focuses on the media and technologies that
support it. One branch of this school, the members of which we might
call traditional technologists, shares much in common with the previous
approach, as they also define plagiarism in simple moral terms based
on a presumption of universally shared values. However, they see
recent changes in media culture as fundamentally corrupting these
values: as the World Wide Web increasingly becomes students
primary research tool, new technology-based forms of plagiarism
are believed to proliferate and are seen as a cause for alarm. Thus
advice books such as Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss Student
Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call appear
with cover decorated in a fiery motif of red, yellow and orange.
This
book use the language of warfare in chapter titles such as "A
Call to Action," "Things are Bad and Getting Worse,"
"Information as a First Line of Defense," "High Tech
Defenses" and "Be Vigilant about Cheating and Plagiarism"
to emphasize the inherent danger to academic integrity and to urge
educators to mobilize. This general feeling of threat is extended
in rhetoric of biological warfare: according to the senior editor
of The American School Board Journal, plagiarism (which is never
differentiated from cheating) is seen as an "epidemic"
and "a plague" on the American school system (Bushweller
xi).
Because
students can easily download or cut and paste not only from a variety
of legitimate sites, but also digital "paper mills"online
businesses that sell completed student papersthe most egregious
forms of plagiarism are seen as becoming easier than ever. Whether
this is an actual fact or not is difficult to ascertain, as I mentioned
before; certainly the inflated language used to describe it creates
an environment of hyper-vigilance. (Indeed, considering that paper
files have long been maintained by fraternities and sororities,
digital paper mills such as schoolsucks.com may only be a democratization
of fraud.) Nonetheless, some believe that the only way to combat
the increased opportunities for "cyber-plagiarism" provided
by these is to turn to technology itself. Search engines such as
Google can in seconds track down a Web source used by students when
a teacher enters a problematic phrase, or an even entire sentence.
Furthermore, services now existTurnitin.com is one of the
most widely usedthat provide online plagiarism-detection software.
Many universities or individual departments do subscribe, since
even when teachers do not actually use these services, there is
evidence that warning students about this possibility works as a
deterrent. This is in spite of the fact that ethical and legal questions
have been raised about the violation of students privacyevery
paper submitted becomes part of the business databaseand
about the pedagogical value of responding to all student work with
suspicion.
Another
approach to understanding Internet-specific plagiarism, however,
suggests that these sorts of counter moves are at best futile, at
worst, reactionary responses. Those in this branch of the technological
approach, who we might label postmodern technologists, see the ease
with which students can copy from the Internet not as a temptation,
but a new way of thinking about the creation and circulation of
texts. From the beginning, new media supporters have drawn on historical
studies to highlight the different practices of writing supported
by current communication technologies in contrast to those based
in the market- and property-driven forms of print. This view of
the ways in which digital media fundamentally reshape our assumptions
can be traced back at least to Ted Nelson, who not only coined the
term "hypertext" in the 1960s, but also claimed it would
bring about a "rebirth of literacy" (Landow 170). Even
in its earliest, pre-Web form, the flexible and interactive nature
of the hypertext environment was thought to be incompatible with
the stability necessary to support the regime of proprietary authorship
and copyright law. As Jay David Bolter details:
As
long as the printed book remains the primary medium of literature,
traditional views of the author as authority . . . will remain convincing
for most readers. The electronic medium, however, threatens to bring
down the whole edifice at once. . . . [I]t denies the fixity of
the text, and it questions the authority of the author. (153)
Because
it was interactive and non-linear, allowing readers to decide which
of the many links they would pursue, hypertext was thought to be
able to strip this primary author of his vestments of solitary genius
and originality, concepts funding notions of plagiarism. More recent
claims also contend that new media forms generate a new ethos, the
"Napsterization of knowledge" or a GenX "cultural
commons" as it has been termed, and that popular notions of
the morality of plagiarism are thus outdated. Much on the Web, after
all, is collective and/or anonymous, and most web authoring is not
compensated financially. Web pages often contain chunks of other
pages and graphics freely circulateall without attribution.
The Webs ephemeral nature is thought to be fundamentally incompatible
with the fixity of print text that is required for "real"
plagiarism.
Interestingly,
traditional technologists rely on the same historical contrast of
print and digital forms to decry this trend and urge a continuation
of print-based ways of understanding and regulating the copying
of texts. Mallon, for example, laments the easy and more casual
approach to writing and research spawned by the Web and argues for
"retention of the printed, bound book" (248). In this
common plea we see the ease in which the familiarprintbecomes
the neutral ground against which new media are constructed and compared.
Print/digital becomes a fixed binary reinscribing moral nature vs.
pernicious technology. This traditional approach, however, merely
reverses the terms used by postmodern technologists: both groups
create a media-essential notion of plagiarism, ignoring the social
and discursive construction of communication machines and the mores
that order their use.
Plagiarism
and Pedagogy
Many
of those concerned about student plagiarismwhether they draw
on traditionalist or technology-based approaches to understand itassert
that a large part of the ethical responsibility for this problem
lies with educators themselves. The former focus on ways instructors
can structure classrooms to actively prevent plagiarism, which they
see as a lurking threat. Some insist that the core value of academic
integrity, while unassailable in itself, should not be taken for
granted as understood by the uninitiated, but instead should be
routinely explained to and discussed with students. Others suggest
that teachers develop assignments that are difficult to plagiarize
because of their specificity, their reliance on course materials,
or their relevance to student lives and individual opinions.
On
the other hand, many composition instructors assert that while academic
dishonesty should be condemned, research methodology, source use
and citation practices need to be more rigorously taught to students
as conventions, not innate textual principles. Indeed, some believe
that "patchwriting," as Rebecca Howard terms the linking
together of several paraphrases from unacknowledged sources, is
an important stage in the evolution of student knowledge and rhetorical
skill. They may also view plagiarism as a problem in the development
of "voice," a reflection of a students lack of confidence
in his or her own opinions and authority, or a misunderstanding
of the very purposes of academic writing. Because they see plagiarism
as a complex learning issue, these educators question the morality
of "prosecuting" students for their ignorance or lack
of ability, and resent the negative effects that the "policing"
of plagiarism has on teacher-student relations. The few policy statements
written by this camp thus classify plagiarism into two-tiers, distinguishing
purposeful fraud from accidental source misuse. The slippery nature
of "intent to deceive," however, is seldom interrogated.
Unfortunately,
in constructing this student-centered approach to plagiarism, most
compositionists have relied rather simplistically on histories of
authorship and intellectual property emerging in the last two decades.
They see plagiarism as fundamentally connected to copyright and
so emerging directlyand artificiallyfrom the consolidation
of the literary market. With a vested interested in seeing their
writing as property, it is believed, a new class of professional
writers begin representing plagiarism as a pressing moral and artistic
concern. Pivotal moments such as the passing of the 1709 Act of
Anne and the publication of Edward Youngs "Conjectures
on Original Genius" are claimed for the "birth" of
modern attitudes toward plagiarism. Indeed, these two disparate
events are often conflated, ignoring the complex cultural negotiations
that took place before, between and after these events. Because
this group sees plagiarism as ultimately an artificial and old-fashioned
construct, though, its historical subtleties are often seen as irrelevant
to todays writing pedagogy.
Plagiarism
and the Uses of History
What
all these approaches have in common is that they are creating an
unbroken, homogenous lineage for the concept of and reaction towards
plagiarism, whether that lineage starts with ancient man looking
over the shoulder of another to amplify his own scratchings, with
a Latin poet so inflamed as to use "kidnapping" to describe
the transgression, with a Renaissance courtier taking umbrage (or
not) when his verses flow from the pen of another, or when a published
novelist deploys emerging concepts of singular genius to buttress
his calls for increased protection from literary pirates. The only
question to be debated is which history is correct: did plagiarism
always exist as a serious moral transgression or is it a more recent
invention? That is, is outrage at appropriated text a natural and
universal response or merely an outdated habit of false consciousness?
This bifurcated view has implications for current practices: we
either take plagiarism as seriously as our wise elders did, continuing
to fight their good fight against it, or we dismiss it as an eighteenth-
(or seventeenth- or sixteenth-) century contrivance whose time has
now passed. As Bertrand Goldgar similarly noted in his Afterword
to a collection of essays, Plagiarism in Early Modern England, "either
one believes that what the world calls "plagiarism" has
some mode of existence and is a moral issue related to thefts or
acts of appropriation, or one thinks it is an illusion, a term rendered
meaningless because there is no possibility of originality"
(215). Such a view makes the plagiarism issue simple, indeed: it
is merely a matter of choosing teams.
All
of these uses of history, however, ignore the fact that, even as
the concept of singular authorial genius did slowly became culturally
dominant, alternative understandings of the sanctity of originary
text and ways of judging the acceptability of derivative practices
flourished. In the search for the origins of plagiarism, what has
been neglected is the subtle, shaded and fundamentally contested
nature of the issue. Plagiarism has never had one meaning, but is
a dialogic and elastic concept. I do not refer here to historical
changes in meaning, but distinctions within a given period, among
different groups with sometimes opposing stakes in plagiaristic
practices. Locating these multiple understandings of plagiarism
demands, however, that we set aside our own moral or theoretical
certainties on the issue. It is only when, as Paula McDowell has
put it, we venture "into the realm of what seems strange to
us" that we begin to understand "not only our own literary
values and agendas, but also . . . those values original sociocultural
functions and consequences" (McDowell 16). "Strangeness"
can be useful, though, only if we take care not to make it so exotic
that we homogenize its Otherness. When we look, for example, as
I will, at turn-of-the-eighteenth-century notions of plagiarism,
we do not discover the monolithic early-Enlightenment mode of thinking,
but see linguistic registers through and against which notions about
writing are produced. Understood this way, "plagiarism"
becomes an unstable notion, continually making and re-making itself.
In
our search for new plagiarisms, one certainty we must resist is
the idea that plagiarism is fundamentally a writers issue.
Usually, histories of plagiarism draw on as evidence the reports
of always already canonical authors, often the "victims"
themselves of textual appropriation. These writers are taken as
the cultural voice, the last word in the definition of a given period.
I would like to suggest, however, that just as we see these conflicting
views on plagiarism circulating in our own time, we look at historical
definitions as similarly competing for discursive space in the cultural
arena. Authors, after all, were not the only ones with an interest
in these issues, and the focus on plagiarized authors voices
itself perpetuates the "crime" model of plagiarism by
upholding certain parties in the dynamic as victims, which implies
that plagiarizers are victimizers. This may be an historically accurate
perception in some cases. However, it also useful to interrogate
alternate understandings from other positions. I would like to turn,
then, to the realm of booksellers, to explore new perspectives of
plagiarismnot to present their definition as the correct one,
but to illustrate the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the term
we take so much for granted.
What
is a Bookseller?
Booksellers
are an interesting group to me precisely because their very name
yokes together terms often viewed as incompatible within literary
studies, reminding us that books have a material history as items
manufactured to be sold. Indeed, booksellers often worked throughout
a books individual history to bring it into being. In this
respect, they functioned much more in the role of a modern day publisher
than a mere retailer. In fact, with the assistance of family members,
and often working in partnership with wives, they juggled a multitude
of tasks: they thought up saleable ideas, negotiated with writers,
managed employees and/or apprentices, hired printers, collaborated
with other booksellers on large projects, and encouraged puffery
or bought advertising to promote their works. At times they gathered
subscribers to underwrite projects, or forged connections with aristocratic
patrons, whose sponsorship minimized booksellers financial
risk. They also supervised distribution and retailing to local shops,
stall and mercuries as well as to provincial networks, while at
the same time selling print texts and sometimes other wares in their
own shops. Even in this last function, they held remarkable power,
creating literary taste by guiding their customers choices.
Despite
the variety of activities in which booksellers engaged, keeping
the engine of print culture humming, however, historic attention
has been paid mostly to their purchasing of texts (and concomitant
right to copy) from writers. This was often the least of their duties.
Instead, many conceptualized projects themselves, merely hiring
or commissioning writers to work as directed, if not writing their
own texts. Several constructed editions of collected works whose
right to copy they owned (or not), or served as editors of newspapers
or periodicals, the content of which they often controlled. It is
thus crucial to realize how involved booksellers were in every aspect
of print making, including those tasks deemed "creative"
or "intellectual." As Adrian Johns explains,
In
managing publications, Stationers, and often booksellers in particular,
controlled events. The practices and representations of their domains
affected every character and every leaf of their products. Isolating
a consistent, identifiable, and immutable element attributable to
the individual author would be virtually impossible in these circumstances.
Attributing authorship was thus intensely problematic for both contemporary
and future readers. A priori, virtually any element in a work might
or might not be the Stationers responsibility, in virtually
any field of writing. (137)
Such
a realization helps undermine the priority given to authors in literary
histories, suggesting that textual production was often the result
of collaborative partnerships, in which "intellectual"
and "imaginative" tasks could segue seamlessly into production
schedules and business decisions.
This
view of the wide-ranging function of booksellers serves to bring
plagiarism down to a more earthly realm. First, it disturbs any
certainties about which text "belongs" to whom, making
plagiarism as an individual crime a difficult accusation to support.
More importantly, though, once we begin to examine the material
nature of book production, we ask different questions of the concept:
how did plagiarism operate in practice as a deterrent, an explanation
or a gatekeeping mechanism for some forms of textual activity? Or
to approach the issue from an even more neutral approach, how was
the reproduction of unattributed pre-written text (a clunky but
impartial description of plagiarism) understood, utilized, and defended
(or not) by those charged with circulating those reproductions?
To answer these questions, it is sometimes necessary to analyze
what is not said, the complaints not made. Silence may not seem,
on the surface, to be useful for the historian in search of evidence,
but it speaks volumes on social acceptability and normative practices.
Plagiarizing
and Projecting: A Case Study
John
Dunton (1659-1732) is a useful bookseller to study because he was
and remains a marginal figure. He was never wealthy, prominent or
well-respected, though he did have moments in the spotlight. Furthermore,
during his life span, the book trade metamorphosed from a guild-regulated
enterprise to an government-licensed medium to a major capitalist
undertaking. As businesses consolidated, textual output of all sorts
accelerated and gentrified. In Duntons own career, he witnessed
and participated in major cultural changes in attitudes towards
print, as the potentially threatening and politically destabilizing
press transformed into to a technology of edification and entertainment.
Indeed, his own practice and production record represents what was
most esteemed and reviled about the work of print.
Most
to our point here, Dunton has been labeled a plagiarist, though
not, pertinently, in his own time. Almost 250 years after Duntons
death, in 1977, literary scholar and detective Albert C. Cook III
presented the evidence in an article for the Bibliographical Society
of America: Dunton was a crook. Not only did Dunton publish a work
explicitly derived from John Bunyons popular Pilgrims
Progress (authored by a colleague of Bunyons), but he "crossed
over the line dividing allusion from outright copying" (20)
in publishing the more "insidious" (15) The Pilgrims
Guide From the Cradle to his Deathbed (1684). Although the name
of his late father, a rector, adorns the title page, this work is
actually mostly unattributed pieces, or as Dunton put it, "Fifty
Several Pleasant Treatises, rarely, if ever handled before"a
statement Cook calls an "outright lie" (20) before listing
the many "true" sources, including Donne, Herbert and
Bunyan. He enumerates many examples of "obvious plagiarizing"
(25) of themes, motifs, character names, plots and language from
John Bunyons Pilgrims Progress as well as its sequel, which
was published the same year as Duntons book, indicating that
Dunton may have seen early manuscript copy. Cook expresses puzzlement
that Dunton would use so many writers so obviously familiar to his
readers, finding it not only "a clear measure of Duntons
boldness" but "an indictment of the age" that he
could "get away with it" (25). He is especially disturbed
that while Duntons "reputation as a bookseller was not
good everywhere in the trade, no contemporary ever darkened it with
a charge of literary thievery" (25). In short, Duntons
blatant plagiarism was met with a strange silence.
It
is easy from our perspective to see what Cook did not: Duntons
"plagiarism" puts into print the conventions of earlier
commonplace books; he wrote before the Act of Anne granted copy
protection (though even that laws strict confines did not
protect writers from derivations, but only protected literal word-for-word
copies); imitation, not originality, was a favored mode of writing.
Easy, perhaps, but not so simple. Cook may have been even more confusedor
outragedif he had read Duntons own thoughts on the subject.
In his 1705 autobiography, The Life and Errors of John Dunton Citizen
of London (published only four years before the Act of Anne), he
criticizes the dishonesty of writers, representing them as parasites
feeding off of the work of others, and contrasting them with upright,
virtuous booksellers:
A man
should be well furnished with an honest policy, if he intends to
set out in the world now-a-days. And this is no less necessary in
a Bookseller than in any other Tradesman; for in that way there
are plots and counterplots, and a whole army of Hackney Authors
that keep their grinders moving by the travail of their pens. These
Gormandizers will eat you the very life out of a Copy so soon as
it ever appears; for as the times go, Original and Abridgement are
almost reckoned as necessary as Man and Wife; so that I am really
afraid that a Bookseller with a good conscience will shortly grow
some strange thing in the earth. (52)
The
language of conspiracy, warfare, and death is marked: plotting armies
will kill and devour print texts. We may be reminded, in fact, of
the heightened rhetoric of Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the
Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call, described earlier. Playing with the
common motif of the writer as father of his text, Dunton here figures
an unnatural congress, perhaps with plagiary instead of the muse,
and a husbandry that produces only the stunted or monstrous. As
in may of todays treatises, writers are figured by their very
role as potentially immoral. To Dunton, it is he and his fellow
shopkeepers who are the moral and learned agents ready to police
the trade.
This
might be dismissed as mere hypocrisy, since Dunton himself could
be seen as a "gormandizer" of others texts. As we
examine Duntons views, however, it is clear that the situation
is more complex. In the process of casting writers as degenerates
and booksellers as spiritual heroes, Dunton endows himself and his
fellow tradesmen with another characteristic usually thought of
today as pertaining only to authors: originality. According to Dunton,
a published text belongs to the bookseller not just because he has
it printed, imprints it with his name, sells it in his shop and
registers it with the Stationers Company (though all these
reasons may be criteria enough), but often because he thought up
the idea for it in he first place. Thus Dunton can say of a fellow
bookseller:
His
talent lies at Projection. . . . He is usually fortunate in what
he goes upon. He is a man of good sense; for I have known him lay
the first rudiments and sinews of a design with great judgement,
and always according to the Rules of Art or Interest. (209)
Throughout
Life and Errors, Dunton calls his own texts and those sponsored
by others "projects," often using the term as a gerund,
"projecting," or in its infinitive form, "to project."
These verbals connote an on-going state, the work of the past reaping
the benefits of the future: the booksellers job was to supervise
the work of his project through from its origins in rough idea to
its final form as a commodity on store shelves, awaiting its readers.
We might compare this term to our more familiar, static term, "literary
work," which conveys a frozen, timeless object that erases
from its history all evidence of the mental and physical work involved
in its creation.
In
this context, it makes sense that, when Dunton lists and describes
the numerous booksellers among his acquaintance, he always includes
the most important works they sponsored and sold, never bothering
to mention who may have actually written these texts. He does the
same with his own list of "projects." Any writer involved
was merely a hireling not worthy of notice. (He does make exceptions
in the rare cases in which the writer is well-known enoughwhether
for literary or other reasonsthat his name itself is a selling
point.) Further, it is the booksellers themselves who must assume
ultimate authority for the language of their texts. For example,
while regretting his selling of some books larded with "profane
expressions" (201), he protests, "I am heartily sorry
I had any concern in them: but the Author sent the Copy to the press
as he wrote it off, and in regard I had no suspicion of him, I did
not peruse the Letters till it was past time to alter them"
(201). While Dunton blames the writer, the writer is not ultimately
the responsible party; any public condemnation will be directed
at Dunton, who has the final obligation of "perusing"
and censoring. Dunton clearly believes the writer has no right to
have printed what he may want, but as an employee, has only the
duty to be above suspicion in fulfilling the desires of the bookseller.
This
notion of the booksellers dominance in the creation of projects
of interest helps us to understand Duntons comments on his
own work, and his seemingly hypocritical attitude towards unattributed
text recycling. Again and again through his text he goes out of
his way to insist on its originality. In his introductory letter
framing his text, Dunton claims that his Life and Errors is an "Original
Project" (xv), "pure Novelty" (xvi), "wholly
new" (xv) and "the natural issue of my brain pan, bred
and born there, and only there (xvi). He elaborates, "the History
of my Life and Errors is . . . wholly gathered from my own breast,
neither is my Idea of a New Life stolen from anything else but my
own thoughts of becoming a New Man" (xvi). Perhaps he protests
too much? This would support the idea that his earlier appropriations
had been dishonestly intended. However, if we put aside our own
definitions, we may see that Dunton uses "novelty" strategically,
rather than as an intrinsic description. His autobiography is published
in 1705, when ideas about authors rights were beginning to
circulate more widely. This does not mean that all participants
in the trade endorsed whole-heartedly the idea that an author owed
no allegiance to predecessors and produced solely, spontaneously
and originally. But as the market for books became more crowded,
with abridgements, cheap piracies and new collections of old works
beginning to baffle consumers, it may have meant that a claim of
"novelty" could be used to gain a competitive edge for
a given print project. This idea is supported by the fact that for
Dunton, what is "new" is not linked to imagination, as
it would be for writers a century laterafter all, he is writing
autobiography. In a passage in which he apologizes for repeating
some of the same word patterns in descriptions of the many personages
he explains: "My Thousand Characters are entirely new, except
Nine that I formerly published; and having written those before
with my own hand, I was loth to be at the pains of writing again
the same characters, having done it as well as I could before"
(xviii). Again, he is discussing his representation of real people,
not referring to "characters" in the sense of imaginary,
fictional devices. What he does apologize for, however, is the fact
that their descriptions have been published before, that they are
not new to print. To Dunton, this is when ideas countthere
is no sense that they matter much before being printed, except inasmuch
as they will be used for later print projects. His is a concrete,
not an abstract or intangible, originality. His ideas may have emerged
from his brain, but they are embodied through the work of his hand,
the physical and mental "pains" of writing, which stands
in for all the work a bookseller oversees that brings words to life:
the inscribing of language in ink, the pressing of letters onto
a page, the stitching of those pages into a book.
Thus
we might see that unattributed text repetition for Dunton would
always be connected to, but not the same as, piracy, the stealing
of entire works. Piracy to him was material form of dishonest trade,
from which he goes out of his way to distance himself (his autobiography
teems with references to his honest trade). Wholesale text repetition
hurt fellow booksellers in that it denied them a sale, but it violated
trade custom, not an intrinsic moral law. As Johns notes, piracy
is a "contestable attribution," one that stood for "a
wide range of perceived transgressions of civility emanating from
prints practitioners" (32; my emphasis). To Dunton, piracy
is different than re-using bits of a writers text. First,
writers were, in Duntons representation, fringe members of
the trade, slippery figures of low status and morality (the "gormandizer"
passage above is merely one of many that castigates writers). Perhaps
in the power relations structuring the trade, he felt free to use
what he might of the text they had writtenin any case, it
was not "their" text in the way we understand text to
belong to a writer today. Their words usually belonged to the sponsoring
bookseller, and as long as Dunton was producing something "new"
out of the previous work of writerseven if that newness consisted
of a shorter or modified versionhe was not hurting the original
publisher. He might be especially free with unpublished writings,
seeing that more as "scooping" a competitor than stealing
from him. But given Duntons material understanding of "new,"
"novel," and the wide range of the work of writing/printing,
it would not even be transgressive to use previously published characters,
plots, themes, etc. as long as these ideas were arranged differently
in a novel context and in a new physical format.
A more
dialogic approach to the discourse of the print trade thus helps
us catch a glimpse of what is hidden in many standard histories
of plagiarism. "New" and "novelty" are booksellers
terms, not linked with intrinsic, individualized notions of authorial
genius and ownership rights. Yet they are connected with Duntons
use of the term "originality," a concept that later became
the cornerstone of proprietary authorship. Dunton's Life and Errors
is a new (or original) product, never seen before on other booksellers
shelves. The idea for it, too, is new, but only matters because
it is part of his investment in and work on the project. "Originality,
" therefore, is used to mark the boundaries of a print commodity
for which one expected the rewards of good sales. I should stress
that I am not interested in "protecting" Dunton from critical
aspersions; indeed, I cannot claim to have any understanding of
his "true" moral character. Nor do I wish to create a
history of origins, date the emergence of an ur-originality or claim,
conversely, that it did not exist. Certainly many writers did complain
about the continued use of material they had sold to one person
for one purposethough often complaints focused more on the
corruption of their meaning than on "stealing" per se.
However, what we can infer from Duntons rhetoric is that originality
and copying were in a fact vexed terms, not in opposition, but with
variable meanings in different situations.
Conclusion:
Media Dis-ease and the Plagiarism Cure
Duntons
autobiography was one of many texts to take up these terms in discussions
of the trade, its politics and principles, and the role of the purveyors
of print. Indeed, his work is representative of a proliferation
of text about textsor more accurately, print about printwritten
and produced from within the trade itself during his lifetime: tracts,
treatises, manuals, autobiographies, even fiction. I see the generation
of these sorts of work as symptomatic of the eighteenth-century
discourse I have elsewhere called "print anxiety," represented
in the many works of this period in which publishing practices are
discussed, derided or decried. These books about books attempt to
describe, analyze, standardize and regulate their craft and trade,
especially after periods of unruly growth, disruptive restructuring,
or political events in which the press appeared to play a key part.
Operating as prescriptive as well as descriptive projects, they
not only reflect these changes in their trade, but react to them
in ways that produce specific ideological regimes. We can see Duntons
descriptions of textual originality and the problems with "gormandizing"
writers as one such instance, an attempt to fix terms like "new"
and "copy" in the interest of the trade, and to benefit
personallythrough the sale of Life and Errorsfrom his
(re)definitions.
Today,
we find ourselves again musing anxiously on similar issues. It is
easy to blame new technologies such as the Internet and new forms
such as the Web, but these are only the most obvious and latest
target of our information dis-ease. Multi-media forms of entertainment
proliferate and compete; derivationwhether "licensed"
spin-offs, formulaic repeats, or high-art postmodern pasticheis
the standard mode of expression, not the exception. One does not
need French theory to understand the "death of the author"
in an age when advertising shapes the editorial content of magazines,
press releases dictate whats news, spin governs the transmission
of fact, promotional tours define who and what is literary, and
even academic knowledge has become an enumerated commodity or "work
product." These are not necessarily new phenomenaeven
John Dunton would recognize the dynamic if not the specificsbut
the sheer rate at which media forms proliferate make its un-anchored
and dehumanizing qualities more glaringly obvious. "Plagiarism"
can thus be seen as the discourse produced in defense of humanistic
values such as authenticity and meaning.
At
the same time, because of the context of strengthened copyright
law and the juridical zeal that accompanies that consolidation (e.g.,
suing kids for using Napster), deployments of plagiarism have the
unintended consequences of buttressing precisely those corporate
interests manufacturing our concerns. Disney and Time Warner want
you to worry about plagiarism, inasmuch it parallel and provides
a moral framework for their fight to increase protection for their
copyrighted properties. Thus, like in Duntons time, the rhetoric
of unethical copying today does not mirror long-standing attitudes
about textual ownership, authorship, the legal concepts that supports
those, but produces them anew. Plagiarism is not a concrete essence,
but a rhetorical tool. We might do well to remember that even academic
theorizing has larger social effects. When we vigilantly guard our
textual borders against attacks by marauding plagiarizersbe
they constructed as morally degenerate, technologically tempted
or academically unawarewho really benefits?
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