Customer Reviews

Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World

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Contrary to other opinion, this is a very fine book and a must read for educators at any level. Intellectual property is not and can not now be absolutely defined, but as teachers, we have to open the discussion, and here is where that discussion begins.

What we perceive as "plagiarism" has complex definitions and even more complex motivations. This book honors the complexity. It's really very easy to pronounce that "students cheat." However, when their own instructors model the same behavior that their students are penalized for, the issue becomes a whole lot less simplistic.

For instance, I have taught at the university level for many years. I have regularly had my instructional materials "borrowed" without my authorization by other instructors in our program (and other universities). I've never complained to administration. Why would I? The materials serve.

As a kind of "in" joke, however, I started inserting a tiny stylized image into the corner of my handouts, in part so my students would recognize the originator. We all got a kick.

To this day, I will see new teachers (and veterans) in the mailroom, whiting out or otherwise eliminating my stylized image so that they can present my materials as their own. When I mention this to my freshman students, they respond: "If we did that, we'd get thrown out of school!"

And to complicate matters, how much of the wisdom in "my" materials was picked up at faculty meetings, grading sessions, talks over dinner, phone calls?

"Plagiarism" isn't as simple an idea as we might suspect.

I will tell you that I have taught with both the editors over the years. You might imagine that this colors my judgment, but it doesn't, really , except that I have first-hand observations that testify to the fact that these two scholars are exceptional educators who know how the classroom works and understand not just the theory but the practice of composition.

I would urge anyone teaching writing to get this book and consider the thoughtful selections within. Not seriously pondering the issues raised here, I believe, would be pretty lame, given the challenges we face in dealing with the appropriation and citation of text as we enter an era of nearly limitless communication.

Not to discount the years of intellectual effort which have gone into this work, but I just could't help thinking after my first read through, "What a load of rubbish and a complete waste of time and money! ! !" I'll say right up front that "Yes, I have written a book on plagiarizm myself. Quite true. But this has not colored my assessment of Perspectives on Plagiarism." I guess I'm just reacting to the overly (pseudo-??)academic/scholarly jargon which permeates much of the work.

The problem with most academics, including most [but not all] of the contributing authors to the work, is that they are so attached to their pet theories and intellectualizing that they can't escape from the intellectual masturb*&*%#$ a la Foucault, Barthes and others in the same critical tradition. This is evident in the wide-ranging discussions of authorship, postmodernism, and the "remains of the author".

For the solely academic and intellectual I suppose there might be some enjoyment in these Perspectives on Plagiarism, but I myself found them quite dry, unstimulating, and on the whole irrelevant to what's really happening on university campuses today other than the discussions in Part II: Applications in which there were some useful info on Writing Center operations.

As most of the so called GenX knows though, the real writing centers are in Cyberspace, on the Internet where downloading of papers has been commonplace since the mid-1990s. Nowadays, cheatsites have been revamped to write papers on any topic, any timeframe (overnight specials!), according to a student's needs.

I wish I hadn't wasted my $$$ on this book as a student researching the topic for a paper some time ago. Wanna buy it cheap? $5 and it's yours. Just send me an email.

For a better, eminently intellectual read on the topic, I'd recommend Sean Burke's The Death and Return of the Author. Wow! This guy demolishes the Foucault/Barth assertion that the Author is dead. Instead, the Author seems rather to be making a "sly and spectral return". So much for the Frenchies and their pet theories. The Author ain't dead like they thought. Barthes and Foucault are quite dead at this point, the first run down by a laundry truck in Paris, the second succumbing to AIDS in the 1980s. But the Author is still quite alive contrary to Barthes, Foucault and other views in the "Death of the Author" intellectual masturb*&*%#$ camp.

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Dr. Herbert Ulysses Quickwit
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