20100803.0844

Plagiarism has been much on my mind lately, as I think I may have noted. As I have spoken with my colleagues, I have found that many of them are reporting things similar to my experience; students are doing things that we call "cheating" openly and in many cases unabashedly. And that is not a comfortable situation for anyone--instructors are placed in a position to have to confront students, and students are forced either to admit their errors (not a bad thing, but not an easy one for any of us) or contest the instructor's judgment (which, since many of us use Google as well as did the student who cheated, is usually not an easy thing to do).

It was with some interest, then, that I read this article, in which Trip Gabriel discusses the increased incidence of plagiaristic behavior at even the higher levels of undergraduate academia. Perhaps I am something of a romantic, but it seems to me that there is something gravely wrong when top-notch institutions--whose students are supposedly academically socialized to a great extent--suffer from the same sort of rash of cut-and-paste, get-it-done-easily-and-move-on-quickly mentality that is found at other institutions where such a production-based mindset is more expected.

Leaving aside the problems inherent in the idea that there are institutions of higher learning where "getting done" is the accepted method of progress (and the hierarchical academia that idea entails), I cannot help but wonder if the reliance, in papers as well as "creative" works, on "sampling" does not point to some degree of stultification. I well realize that my wondering smacks of curmudgeonly in-my-dayism, that it falls firmly in line with the traditional "kids these days" complaint. But there is something worrying about the idea that the "remix" is an independent creative product.

I admit, though, that I am very much a product of my upbringing and education, both of which have been very much in keeping with the "traditional" American idea of white-middle-class-as-norm.

I admit also that the idea of the remix is an old one. Medieval English literature, for example, is replete with examples of recastings of older stories. Indeed, the focal work of my current research, Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, is in most of its text an adaptation of other sources--where it is not an outright copy-over of them (as is pointed out by Vinaver, among others). Chaucer, the veritable parent of English literature, recasts stories in several of his more famous pieces (Troilus and Boece come to mind). And there is the old adage that Shakespeare himself was an inveterate plagiarist (to which I append for my students, "When you write as well as Shakespeare, you, too, may plagiarize. Not an instant before."). Their evidence asserts that copying is not a barrier to artistry, even enduringly high artistic achievement. And it follows that it may not be a barrier to serious academic inquiry.

But.

Even if a number of older, respected artists (and scholars, no doubt) made their way by taking freely from what they found before them, they did more than simply regurgitate it wholesale. Malory, who keeps lines of his sources intact, often writes of "the frenssh booke," and where he fails to, he nonetheless recasts language and events in such a way as to significantly alter the thrust of the stories he relates. Chaucer acts similarly, freshening his re-settings by casting them into different verse-forms. And Shakespeare's contributions are too numerous for me to list.

Who among the samplers, remixers, and plagiarists at work now do so much with what they take up?

Works Cited
~Malory, Thomas. Malory: Complete Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 2nd ed. New York, Oxford UP, 1978. Print.
~Vinaver, Eugène. Introduction. Malory: Complete Works. By Thomas Malory. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. v-x. Print.