Looks like I finally beat Josh in the poky little puppy sweepstakes

Sanctioning Voice-De Grazia-I Actually remember reading about this case and unlike my fellow classmates, I find media law to be most fascinating. Herein, we are introduced to the case of Masson v. New Yorker Magazine. In an article profiling the head of the Freud archives, Masson was quoted and we assumed so, for the “ “ that appeared around his words as saying both, “My colleagues consider me to be an intellectual gigolo,” and “ I am the greatest analyst who ever lived” and sundry items. Masson claimed he never said such things. Two lower court rulings claimed that though these quotes appeared in “ “ it was enough that the quotes approximated what he said. Apparently it wasn’t too far from the truth as the court accepted as evidence, tape recordings of Masson being interviewed and they said, “eh, close enough.” The Supremes overturned both court rulings and said that “quotations guarantee a higher standard of accuracy” (p. 284). How close we cam to punctuation anarchy is warned by Degrazia when she tells us, “how close quotation marks came to being obsolete” (p. 285). Imagine not being able to use air quotes anymore! Seriously, as an aside, as a working journalist, I often have to reconstruct notes and I can’t really says that everything I put within quotation marks is 100-percent verbatim. My standard is that it has to be in the spirit of what the person would have said. After this, we are treated (?) to history of punctuation and learn, among other things, that the quotation marks were not common until the end of the eighteenth century. This makes sense, as we know that folks like Plato and Xenophon, felt free to put words into the mouth of Socrates and others. It really makes one question those who insist on bibilical inerrency as the biblical compilers would certainly have been in the tradition of ascribing voice to others freely. It makes sense that the quotation mark rises at about the same time as capitalism since, as DeGrazia, says , “enclosing private materials from public use” (p. 290). If I can follow her argument correctly, the quotation mark is part of the legal guarantee in liberal democracies against the appropriation of voice by the state. E.g., the
ability of the state to coerce voice out of people, as in the case of criminal proceedings and the well-known, “ I plead the fifth.” The state cannot compel voice. So, by putting
Masson’s voice via quotation marks to words he did not say, DeGrazia calls the writer in the case, “a forger” ( p. 299). The lower court rulings ascribed to Malcolm, a crime of omission, the Supreme Court, a crime of commission. So, the real danger in losing the quotation marks, fro DeGrazia’s perspective, is that, “ Property divisions would no longer be so clear cut “ (p. 301). At the end of the article, DeGrazia portends the mechanical and electronic age of reproduction in which appropriation of others’ words became much easier to do.

My question thus becomes-while quotations seem to be a hallmark or capitalistic society, what would we really be losing considering that so much of what we consider great literature was produced during the quotationless age when Plutarch and Plato felt free to but pretty much any fool thing into their subjects mouths?







Sampling and the Creator-Sanjek

I am actually quite familiar with Sanjek’s writings, as one might imagine, besides his archival work, he is also a fairly well-known critical scholar. For those of you who think that rap and hip hop started with Jay-Zee and Outkast, Sanjek spins a tail of how the dj, came to us really, from Jamaican immigrants like Kool DJ Herc. Back in Jamaica, “sound system” djs would spin and rap over their records, they would also put the parts of records that their audiences really liked and essentially, created new works. Herc begat Grandmaster Flash, Grandmaster Flash begat Melle Mel and soon LL Cool J and Run-DMC smiled down and it was good. Although in actual deference to the djs, instead of the rappers, I should really laud the likes of Scorpio, Jam Master Jay, Cut Creator and possibly even Terminator X. Okay, for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Djs
Would play the “breaks” or parts of the records that got their audiences out on the dance floor while the rapper would sing and shout over the music. Sanjek looks at how parts of the pop world have once looked upon the creators of hip hop as engaging in “sheer pilferage” (p. 351). In other words ,the Djs and rappers are people devoid of any original creative impulse (romanticism anyone?) . Actually this article comes nicely on the heels of the last one where DeGrazia states that reproduction opens the door to knocking down the quotation marks and making others say what they didn’t (or emphasizing even more what they did c.f. Jerry Harisson’s Five Minutes EP in which he loops Ronald Reagan’s “We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes” remarks). But if the Jerry Harrison examples isn’t creativity, I don’t know what is. While sampling’s legal status, some 20 years after the fact is still unsettled and settled on an ad hoc basis, the legality of it, according to Sanjek, revolves around three issues:

1.) The nature of the appropriation
2.) The length of appropriation
3.) What the sample does to the status of the original (p. 354).

For instance, back in the late 80s, U2 probably would have never come to any sort of agreement with the “group” Negativland over their appropriation of “ I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Which really violated all three of these standards.
One thing that Sanjek is right aabout however, is that appropriational art is not going away anytime soon and some people who use other work can truly be called artists.
Sanjek cites, John Oswald, who truly creates works of art (pp. 357-359). Some artists. Like the Grateful Dead have invited him to play with their original compostions, like “Dark Star.” Sanjek is making the case that the law needs to catch up with this and represent the contributions that hip-hop and plunderphonics make.

Question: Are there any appropriational art forms any of you like?

As you can tell, I was in pop culture heaven here.




Yancey And Spooner -1998-A Single Good Mind-So this is what passes for scholarship in composition studies? Oy Vey! I know some people how if they read this , they would plotz! Seriously though, and if I can be serious for a moment….I spent a semester reading work from the journal Qualitative Inquiry and some of that would make this seem like running ANOVAS-(statistical joke-it means analysis of variance-it’s a statistical test). I had to read the blogs by the English folk before I launched into this one. Lets see….according to the title page, they write together, separately by e-mail-I think I did that one night after a fifth of Jack. I kid! Okay, there seems to be a critique of mainstream collaborative scholars like Lunsford and Ede, going on here , that seems to imply, they really aren’t about true collaboration (p. 47). So, some of the critique centers on the findings of Lunsford and Ede (p.49) that while they strike out against hierarchical collaboration, their findings find suppot for it. Okay-going on to p. 50-it seems that these authors find people in the Lunsford and Ede book who want ownership, which is essentially anti-collaborative. They bring forth this notion of cooperators (p. 52, who operate hierarchically together and divide knowledge and roles efficeiently, they propose this along a continuum- reproduced thusly:


cooperators
-----------------------------------------------
Individual Collaborators

There’s an interesting critique of the privileging of “community” by academics (pp.53-54) who speak of community as this magical, elusive thing-a mythological realm if you will.
They come to this notion that privileging of collaboration really works against those who work better in hierarchical situations (p.55) and robs them of their voice. It’s collaboration and community as absolute ideology. Gee, now I don’t feel so bad about my non-collaborative working style. It’s the hippie elitists keeping me down! The authors say that such privileging cons us into believing we see community and collaboration where it is not.
So if I have this right, collaboration a seemless enterprise but one rife with incontinuities.
And if we truly acknowledge individual working styles, we will acknowledge that people are not on polar extremes of an outdated romanticism versus a wonderful new age collaborationist ethic, but can indeed be on a continuum.

I feel so much better about myself now-unless I totally have this piece wrong it’s really a bit too non-linear for me.

So my question here would be-can I reconcile my leftist, collectivist ideology, with a non-collaborative writing ethic?

Happy Birthday, Laure!

We'll have to have a little piece of intellectual stimulation in your honor tomorrow!

Local Grad Conference, Consider sending your abstracts

The Red River
Graduate Student
Conference
sponsored by the Graduate and Teaching Assistants Organization
of the English Department
at North Dakota State University


The Graduate and Teaching Assistant Organization (GTAO) at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota invites all graduate students in the fields of literature, composition, linguistics, and creative writing to submit abstracts for the second annual Red River Graduate Student Conference (RRGSC). The conference will be held February 19th in Fargo on the NDSU campus. All paper topics related to literature, composition, linguistics, and creative works are welcome. Please consider this conference even if you are in the drafting stage of a paper or project; we also plan to include workshop sessions and roundtable discussions. Panel submissions are encouraged. Faculty members will be present in each session to offer feedback for each participant.

Send abstracts of 250-500 words via email attachment in a Word file no later than January 17, 2004 to the Red River Graduate Student Conference committee at RRGSC@hotmail.com. Please note any technology needs for your presentation and what type of feedback you are looking for (critical, moderate, little).

Any other questions (lodging, transportation, etc.) can be directed to Jennifer McKenzie at Jennifer.McKenzie@ndsu.nodak.edu .

Bloggin' For Venegeance-My Homage To Judas Priest

The Patch writing saga continues where Howard compares (pre?) modern authorhsip with (current?) modern authorship.She takes us down the road of pre-modern mimesis and imitatio, where, while there were authors and texts (such as the bible, Plato and the like) they were considered the common property of all.This is contrasted with the "four pillars" of modern authorship: autonomy, propeitorship, originality and morality. Autonomy is the lonely artist in the garret-propeitorship is the ownesrhip that extends to authorship, originality is the idea that one's ideas should be one's own and morality-which is the equation of productive genius with virtue. This modern conception of authorship led to a beleif by the intellectuals of the 19th century, that though literacy was becoming more widespread, their had to be an intellectual hierarchy established (p.90). This was the notion that great literature could not be understood by the masses. If it could be it was notgreat art (any circularity here?). This has led us to our current attitudes on palgiarism, that professorsare some sort of bastion against the use of non-original material by their lowly students. Although, as we learn in the next chapter, some arei mmune from charges of plagiarism. For instance, thegreat political rhetoric of JFK was largely written by Ted Sorenson and a tribe of writers. Yet, no chargesof plagiarism were ever attached. So, even though a legal hierarchy was established to protect the "four pillars of authorhsip," some could get away with expressing the thoughts of others.But what the essential jist of this chapter is how the academy sets plagiarism in terms of ethics. If we become inculcated with the methods of the academy, the style shhets of the APA and MLA, we have adhered tothe rules of authorship. Those who do not, are either evil or stupid. In the next chapter, we get some models for "patchwriting" of sorts, we all of course now know of the 19th century women's groups, African-Amercian mimesis and patterns of folk-preaching, which all encouraged liberal borrowing from other sources.The next chapter asserts that technology is pushinguys towards another concept of authorhsip, as we all know how easy on-line borrowing is. In the final chapter, we get Moore's reccomendations on plagiarism policy, which seem largely to acknowledge the student role of patchwriting in learning academic discourse and that "punishment" bebased on the intention of the author and be dealt with indivudally as opposed to institutionally.

My question for all of you as you are all teachers of writing in some form or another, will you account for patchwriting in your personal plagiarism policy? To what degree can you account for inention?

Pike's Blog Entry-Vote Early Vote Often Edition

I decided to get this week's blog entry early as I plan on rioting in the streets on Wednesday to protest the LATEST Bush coup-Don't worry -I'll still make sure you guys get pizza:

On to Howard's 74-page defense(?) of "patch writing"

Frankly, this is the first time I've heard of this practice called this-so this article was most illuminating:

We are introduced to her definition of this in the introduction: "copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical strcutres, or pluggin in one synoym for another." She says the standard reaction to this is to label it plagiarism and she says that when she first encontered it, she gave people an "F" and a chance to revise.

In her first chapter, she talks about the problems of plagiarism in terms of definition, punishment and finding. Although, it's much easirer to find plagiarism with the Internet (since most students apparently think we are idiots who have never seen a computer). In terms of punishment, she talks about the problerms of suspension-for students who will galdly serve it out and then apply to a different school. We are then introduced to her introduction to patchwriting when students liberally substituted in writing about an assignment (pp.4-5). We are then told how she learned to stop worrying and love the patchwriting(I'll credit my source here as being Stanley Kubrick). She says that the revision of other's work is not disrespect, or theft, but, the recognition tha the patchwriter, "recognizes the profoundity of the source and strives to join the conversation in which the source participates(p.7)." In chapter two, we are introduced to a definition of whom pagiarism hurts, which is the writer, from whom the transgressor has stolen (p. 18). But, if the patchwriter is merely joining the conversation, how can there be transgression. In Chapter 3, we learn that the academy does not look at patchwriting as a collaboration, which apparently Howard does as collaboartion apparently reuqires both Autonomy, which is close to the romantic notion of authorship (p.36) and originality (p.47). In the final chapter of his reading ,we are introduced to territory we have trod well in this class: the historical development of authorship from the pre-modern in which certain sources were acknowledged as being authors and the desire to imitate them, such as Dionysius of Helicarnasus who thought that the classical period whcih had passed was intellectually superior to his own (p.63). We go on through the Medieaval era, in which those who wrote were inspired by God and to the beginnings of the modern period and the emergence of the author. We also find out that there are uses for knowing about the 1710 Statute of Anne (p.70). I'm not alone.

I found my introduction to patch writing interesting and wondered aloud why Howard ignores the area in which it is most prevalent: Journalism. Journalists patch write all the time. On hundreds of occasions I have produdced writing that has used a report from a wire service, a news release and a newspaper article and perhaps put it together with some m but not always, original reporting. In fact, I have been paid for writing that I have to admit is largely patch-wriitng. In fact, with the classes kind indulgence, I will bring a recently published article to class that is largely patch-written.

Here's my question: Can the class think of any other professions in which patchwriting is the norm?

See you on the barricades.

A quote for Kristen and Mary's project

From the article Laure summarized:

". . . the reader is no longer simply spectator . . . but co-author of what he reads, a second write and active partner. He can enter *into* the landscape of meaning and modify its architecture as he wishes. Once monologue, the text becomes dialogue . . . It is no longer a static invariant, a road traveled in a given direction, recorded once and for all. Rather, it is a moving mosaic [. . .], an unpredictable sequence of bifurcation, a non hierarchical unpredetermined crossroads where each reader can invent his own course along a network of communication nodes . . ." Regis Debray *The Book as Symbolic Object*

Sounds like a possible leaping-off point!

Food for the remainder of the semester

11-3 Jon
11-10 Laure (Comm students are at NCA)
11-17 Mary
11-24 Off for Thanksgiving, work on major projects
12-1 Kelly
12-8 Kristen
12-15 Hand in day, no class

And Here I thought I was going to beat Josh in the "poky-little puppy sweepstakes" Oh, well here's my abtract and blog entries for the week

Copy-Lefting The News

This paper examines that part of the copy-left movement which produces copy-left news information. Copy-left is the spiritual opposite of the notion of copyright. Those who produce copy-lefted works intend for them to be copied and modified as people wish. Copy-left news challenges the notion that news information can and should be proprietary. This paper will examine the Asheville Global Report a print and online publication that uses “mainstream” news sources in a fair use fashion to essentially construct new news stories that highlight facts that may not have been the main gist
of the original story, but highlights important facts. This paper will examine how the
Asheville Global Report fits into the notion of copy-left and how it challenges the traditional concept of news.


and now, for the blog...........Among things were blogging about.............................................................

Deborah Halbert tries to make the argument that "textual poaching" is a distinctly feminist enterprise anf frankly, misses by a mile. poaching is the idea that people can and should apporiate texts and modify them for their purtposes. Her essay is long on assertion and short of evidence. She puts forth such bold assertions as,"Authorship was a method of establishing paternity over a text, the male creation" (p.113). I'm curious as to why she cites the Koons case (p.115) to prover her point, when Koons wasn't a woman (p.115). The seminal (and how's that for a masculinzation!) work on poaching of TV culture by Jenkins shows that while women are involved in such appropriated works as the Kirk/Spock texts, men approporaiate. Frankly, this essay is the sort of leftist-academic codswallop that makes people want to belt leftist-academics.
The essay by Clark deals with her surprise that Autralian academics foun the type of writing centers now common to American campuses to be "sanctioned plagiarism" (p.155). This essay also looks at survey research (!) condcuted at USC on the subject of plagiarism and Writing Centers. The survey results showed that the Biology, English, and Poli. Sci. departments all flet that plagiarism was a significant, while Expository Writing, largely did not (p. 163). The only department wich wasn't ambivalent about the helpfulness of the writing center was the English Department-70-% ofthe faculty in that department felt that the writing center WOUDL help the students. There s an interesting note toward the end of this piece, that CLark believes that Writing Centers are held to a very high standard of not being overly interventionist in helping students with their work. She notes the degree to which writers receive suggestions on their work (216). She then asserts (probably from experience that writing centers cannot do this and our seen as overly interventionist. A lot of the same ground is covered by Shamoon and Burns. They say that they opt for a social and rhetorical construct of the issue and say that instead of building walls around the issue people such as they "engage" it (p.192). I found these essays interesting, because I teach writing and it would never occur to me that helping my students was enabling plagiarism. I guess I jsut don't understand why Writing Centers got rapped with this.

My Question for the week is:

How interventionist are you in teaching writing and do you see yourself at all as a plagiarism enbabler?

Synthesis tomorrow

By popular request, tomorrow in class some time will be devoted to synthesizing and reviewing the sources we have read and discussed during the first half+ of the semester. Please bring all of the readings you can bear without breaking your backs. My hope is that this will help prepare everyone for the exam and reinforce all of our developing knowledge regarding authorship.

See you then!

Episode IV: A New Blog

I would have to say that the most interesting part of this current crop of readings was the chpater concernign the early collegiate culutre of cheating. Especially when I think we all consider that "students today" find no problem with plagiarism. And I also think that there's a belief that plagiarism started with the Internet. I may be whistfully and naively spinning my wheels, here, but I DO think that most students do understand at least at a most basic level that cheating is wrong and do expect consequences for engaging in it. Knowing something's wrong and acting on the beleif that something is wrong are two different things.

I am referenceing Sue Carter Simmons chapter on "Competing notions of authorship" where she tells us that the cre'me de la cre'me during the time that education was really only for the priveliged, cheating was rampant. Simmons seems to indicate that one of the reasons that students at institutions like Harvard cheated so much, is because they beleived it was the fault of the instructors. The issue was reframed, says Simmons, "as a critique of indaquate teaching (p.46)." Student "themes" were on a small number of accepted topics and the ideas were largely recycled from year to year adn they were collected by disinterested teachers. Communal acts of plagiarism, such as fraternity files were an orchestrated act of rebellion,"plagiarism was one of many activities one might engage in out of responsibility to one's and duty to maintain one's position at college" (p.47). It also appears as though institutionally, plagiarism was not considered all that bad of a crime. Simmons says that plagiarism was adressed very little in texts that students used (p.49). And it seems that this act of rebellion was against the fact that they did not consider themselves authors of largely irrelevant themes, "Consequently even when students wrote thier own papers, they may have felt little ownership of the texts they produced"(p.50). I think many college educators today "plagiarism proof" their classes through such mechanisms as in-class work. They type of classes I like to teach are pretty-plagiarism-proof, you really can tell the difference between student and professional media production. I remember a friend of mine at SIUE was concerned that a student news story for a class was such a great leap forward that it couldn't have been written by the student. I read at and noticed many rookie-writing mistakes, like dangling modifiers. My assessment: It was okay, but NOT THAT good tyo consider it plagiarized.

My question for you all is: to what degree do you consider it your responsibility to plagiarize-proof your classes and what do you do (Pop quiz hotshot-what do you do?-since I'm no plagiarist, I'll credit the screen play for SPEED here).

Buzzflash

An illustration of the utility? of repetition in oral presentations (taken a bit too far). I think you'll find this hilarious.

To Blog Or Blog Not (A nod to classic films).

Another type of writing group with which I am familiar, from y creative-writing days, the more-or-less compulsory group within which one may be put as part of a class. I am glad that Spiegelman cops to the methodological issues involved with her study. The most salient one is that case studies are lousy for generalizing (p. 123). Having taken some pedagogy classes, it appears that owneership issues may be expressive of learning styles.

For instance, I would say that Edward is an assimilator. For him, authorship is an abstract concept and he does not haveto be connected to the "real world" to be an author. Texts are dependetn, on Edward's view, writing is created by an autonomous, isolationist act (p.125). The word is made manifest by the author (How's that for waxing biblically!!).

I would call the Franklin Writer's group, accomodators. Their style of writing pedagogy for their group is largely accomodator. As, Spiegelman says, "ownership was a dialectical process, an action. something cnstany engaged and neotiated" (p.127). Writing is an action, a sense of doing. This even seemed to be the case with Brian who expressed the most "ownership" over his work.

Andrew seems to be the most accomodator- like in that he acknowledges the intertextaulity of the group work.

I think some of this may refelct my own percpetion of writing. I prefer to work alone and writing is something I am as opposed to something I do. I think this is largely becuase I am an assimilator.

So. my questions for the week are:

Does learning style affect one's conception of authorship?

also

Can A group learning style be fostered as it appears the Franklin Writer's did in establishing an accomodationsist persepctive? Are writing groups inherently accomodationist?

Summaries

Trickling into your mailboxes you will find my brief comments on your summaries. I have been working on them periodically (albeit slowly) and I hope to soon have them all completed. However, if you don't yet have a response in your mailbox, please don't panic. I'm returning each one when I finish it to give as many people as possible a chance to revise (if desired) as early as possible. I'm finding, even when I've read the article before, I need to reread it to make sure I'm not misremembering the balance of the article.

You will notice that I didn't follow my own guidelines for grading (high pass, pass, fail) on this assignment. Instead, I graded it as a percentage of the 50 points. So, 45-50 is an A, 40-44 is a B, 35-40 is a C, and so on. These may be revised until you are satisfied.

**side note: Josh, could you drop your copy of the Trimbur article in my mailbox so I can easily respond? I will return it to you.

Writing Groups and other foolishness

I found the discussion about the Franklin group most illumiknating-especially as I have just started working with such a group and have yet to figure out this group's dynamics.

It appears that of all the group members-Doug has the most "ownership" over his material and is the least receptive to change in his writing. It's really interesting to figure out just what it is that Doug wants from the group. He plots his fiction so far in advance that they cannot be changed without subtantially changing the story. I found his defense of his use of shopping malls in his story to be particularly defensive. Soes Doug juts want affirmation of his writing skill by the group? Is he just looking for acknowledgeent of his writing ability?

I find it curious that Fay, who has the most writing experience, needs the group the most. This may be because she thrives from genuine contributuions from others for her work. Despite her published track record, it appears that she has less individual "ownership" of her texts.

I have to say that I have benefited greatly from contributions from writing groups. For instance, I once set a lovemaking scene in a cave. I guess I just got carried away with the image of two people entering unknown territory. Someone in my writing group pointed out to me that "doing it" in a cave was a pretty horrible idea and genuinely yucky. I chucked the cave and my intimate scene was much better. (Just so you know, the couple ending up "engaging each other" on a picnic blanket on the grass, or is that T.M.I.?).

I hope I'm not going too far off topic here, but reading about the adventures of the Franklin Writing Group has really led me to question my won motives in seeking out a writing group. Am I like Doug and looking for people to acknowledge how great I am? Or, am I more like a Fay and genuinely need the give and take of such groups.

Here's my question for you all-should writing groups have the disparate Dougs and Fay's or should they be more homogeneous in their composition? Which would work better for you as a writer? (assuming you do some writing).

Ripping Yarns

The second half of the collaboarative effort by Lansford and Ede gives an overview of the concept of authorship.

To briefly recap our heroines' strange adventures ................when he had last left Lansford and Ede-they were presenting their survey research (!?) on the world of everyday writing in which collaborative authorship is the norm.

Our tale now picks up with our intrepid adventuress' reacpping the history of authorship.

Much of this is material our class (Gosh we're smart!!) has already gone over, in which we have learned that single authorship is a relaqtively new concept..medieval and even renaissance authors did not consider themselves tortured geniuses living alone in a garret.

I would really like to focus on one of the more interesting chapters, to me, in these authors' writing on authorship-This is Carpenter's taxnomy of writing (93-95). Carpenter deconstructs (must be one of those darn post-modernists) writing into five essential categories: writing up, down, in, out and over. Writing down is essentially transcription-writing up-is the creation of new semantic material--Writing out is filling out a skeletal report, such as when notes from a meeting are "filled out." Writing in, is supplying missing data from something already written "down"-writing over is the act of compiling, revising, or abridging.

Here's why I find this so fascinating-we have whole bodies of knowledge that fall into one of these other categories and yet they are ascribed to being writing up, as if to privelige them. Let me illustrate with a point if I might. Hegel did not publish his "own" philosophical works. In fact, one of the reasons why Hegel may be such a tough row to hoe is because his students compiled "his" works from their notes. In other words, what we have is not what Hegel wrote up-but what his students wroted down, in out and over. Yet, the work is ascribed to being an act of writing up-is this done by devoted acolytes in service of theirm aster. If so, might we not have material ascribed to Hegel that is actually written up-by a group of his students?

I also liked the section in the last chapter on the differences between cooperative and collaboarative learning. Coooperative learning in cooperative learning (p. 117). Individuals become experts and then lead in some aspects of the cooperative enterprise, which is then largely pursued individualistically. It is mostly positivistic. Collaborative learning as I understand it, carries the collectivist aspect through to the end-did I totally miss the boat on this-or is this what it actually is? Cooperative learning, it would appear still priveliges the concept of single authorship.

My question in this is, given that grading is still considered an individual achievement-how do we foster collaborative learning-the system would still seem to be rigged towards individual authorship.

Musings on Singular Texts/Plural Authors

Lunsford and Ede's Singular texts, plural authors is their rigourous investigation into what they see is really the norm in most writing-that collaboration-rather than single authorship is what happens in most types of writing. What was interesting for me is their cases of writing that we don't normally think of as "writing." In other words, it seems that a lot of us largely hild to the romantic notion of writing. That it is an angst-ridden solitary venture. Writing is what literate people do in the course of their lives, and what this book illustrates is that collaboration is the norm in the normal everyday acts of writing. Important work is done in this type of writing. One of the cases that is highlighted (pp.32-35) is the work of chemist George Irving, who as a person whop works on government-funded projects, has important writing to do. I thought it was interesting (on p. 32) that he looked upon his role of team leader as "a master of ceremonies." It was his job to keep the show rolling. Even in this prosaic writing, the authors of the study show that people like Irving take pride in creativity " Irving reported a strong interest in language and communication (p. 35)." This shows that pride in using language well doesn't just extrend to creative wriers. But yet, these writiers, are very pragmatic about what they do. Dick Miller is a writer and the head of a sanitary district. His collaborative efforts are all very focused and pragmatic, " Miller and his staff write a variety of documents: reprts for their gverning board, letters, memos, speeches-whatever is necessary to get the job done and to maintain good realtions with the public (p.36.)" These collaborators are very purposeful communicators. To pick up on Mary's question-I reiterate what I said last week-I am aware that communities of creative writers "collaboarate" in the workshop environm,ent and yet retain single authorship. By the by-I don't write for Judy, I write for my own research agenda. This whole idea of collaboration brought to the fore a question-I acknowledge the importance of collaborative riting-and yet, I am a writer of very solitary habits-is there a way to reconcile this?

Musings on Singular Texts/Plural Authors

Lunsford and Ede's Singular texts, plural authors is their rigourous investigation into what they see is really the norm in most writing-that collaboration-rather than single authorship is what happens in most types of writing. What was interesting for me is their cases of writing that we don't normally think of as "writing." In other words, it seems that a lot of us largely hild to the romantic notion of writing. That it is an angst-ridden solitary venture. Writing is what literate people do in the course of their lives, and what this book illustrates is that collaboration is the norm in the normal everyday acts of writing. Important work is done in this type of writing. One of the cases that is highlighted (pp.32-35) is the work of chemist George Irving, who as a person whop works on government-funded projects, has important writing to do. I thought it was interesting (on p. 32) that he looked upon his role of team leader as "a master of ceremonies." It was his job to keep the show rolling. Even in this prosaic writing, the authors of the study show that people like Irving take pride in creativity " Irving reported a strong interest in language and communication (p. 35)." This shows that pride in using language well doesn't just extrend to creative wriers. But yet, these writiers, are very pragmatic about what they do. Dick Miller is a writer and the head of a sanitary district. His collaborative efforts are all very focused and pragmatic, " Miller and his staff write a variety of documents: reprts for their gverning board, letters, memos, speeches-whatever is necessary to get the job done and to maintain good realtions with the public (p.36.)" These collaborators are very purposeful communicators. To pick up on Mary's question-I reiterate what I said last week-I am aware that communities of creative writers "collaboarate" in the workshop environm,ent and yet retain single authorship. By the by-I don't write for Judy, I write for my own research agenda. This whole idea of collaboration brought to the fore a question-I acknowledge the importance of collaborative riting-and yet, I am a writer of very solitary habits-is there a way to reconcile this?

Musings on the latest batch

Well-I'm going to begin with the Gere chapter-because it's the most interesting to me-because of stuff I've read about copyleft and what not. Our saga of the story of authorship pick up in this chapter from the early modern-era and how authorship was firmly established at that point to the Americas, where according to our author. "... by the 1870s, the concept of intellectual property was firmly established in the United States, and the construction of authorhsip had been effected that literary criticism lavished considerable attention on the background and intentions of authors, and authors became more powerful advocates for their own rights "(p.383). What this sounds like to me, is that authorship had become fully commodified in 19th century capitalist America. Some media critics like Sut Jhally talk about "commondity fetishism" and what it sounds like to me, is that once authorship had become a commodity, that commodity was given exalted status. For an example of commodity fetishism, think about people and their favorite "brands" of water. It's all H-2-0, but now that it's become commodified, the only step left was to elevate the status of certain brands of water. So, authorship by this time, had become a commodified and elevated brand. In comes the 19th century mania for self-improvement in America and the establishment of mutual education societies. The societies that were composed of women, tended to subvert this branding ofauthorship with "communcal rather than individual ownership of texts, texts both used and produced by the club" (p. 387). They bought texts in common for common usage and they produced texts that were meant to be used by the club and this carried over to the production of texts by club members. they prodcued texts that were designed for common ownership and use by the club. Fascinating. The obvious question is, didthis happen because even the middle-class women who belonged to these societies were marinalized by their status as women and so produced common texts as a form of coomon resistance, or, is thier something inherent to "ownership" and commodification and gender in capitalist society?

Thomas takes us back to pre-capitalist Renaissance europe and a phenomenan called the Commonplace Book. These were blank books in which people copied and it appears, felt free to re-interpret poems thatthey copied. We don't even know who the "authors" of these commonplace books are, as "Most of the time, these poems were transcribed without attribution; sometimes even the comiler of the commonplace book remained anonymous"(p.401). The commonplace that have been collected show a remarkable re-maing of texts. One of thos e commonpalce books that is talked about in this chapter is one that was kept by a cleric named John Lilliat, who even though he obviously regarded texts as sacred, re-wrote some of these to. One such instance was of him re-writing a Psalm to compose a prophecy of what he felt would happen to his England. So, he remembered the psalm-but remaded it also. That is why, in the pre-authorship era, Thomas says "Commonplace books are also about the intimate connection between remembering and re-marking a text-about that is, a practice of reading contingent upon re-writing"(p.410). Think about how we re-mark our own memories as we remember them. The only difference, is that with the commonpalce book, men of letters, remembered sources that were near and dear to them by re-marking them. My question of this is, can we think of any examples in contemporary society in which we remember our texts by re-marking them? An obvious one to me, is people who have used digital technology to "create" muscial works that are already "remembered" in records.

I guess in some ways, the Beaumont and or Flectcher article was least interesting to me, mostly because it seemed to wallow in somewhat obscure, at least for me, literary criticism. It does seem to apply to the discussion we had in class of Shakespeare's "authorship" of the plays even though we know that in Renaissance times, authorhsip of plays was a collaboration of the company, it was ssure to be a practice that carried forth into the early modern world of Shakespeare. It seems that the point that Mastern is tryingto make is that once plays from these eras become literature, "criticism has read them primarily as written communciation between writers and readers (p.366)" So, once they obtained a status beyond perfromance, they demanded an author. Wherethis goes into the title of the piece is Mastern's criticism of the bibliographic criticism (and that ain't navel gazing among literary scholars folks, I don't know what is!!) that insists in determining of a particluar set of plays were the sole product of BEaumont, or Fletcher, and how the two are parsed out by intense criticism and reconstrcution and how this type of criticism relies "implicitly on the assumption that texts are the products of a single and sovereign authorial consciousness" (p.371). The recognition of collaboration requires a recognition that canonical texts are socially constructed. To somewhat visit our Q's from last week-What does it matter if Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare?


Jaszi's article-the bookend to the one we reviewed last week-takes a look at how critiques of authroship have developed. There is the purely cultural approach taken by Focualt which challenged the "naturalness" of authorhsip by packing it into its cultural context. Then Jaszi, gives us Kaplan, who appears to opearte from a more brute political economy model which critiques authorship based on politcal, legal and economic concepts. He then cites Woodmansee's (how's THAT for academic logrolling) attempts to wed the two concepts in the 1980s. Jaszi then starts taking us down the road of his own scholarship on authorhsip. He takes us through the Feist case, which we covered a little bit in class last week. It then goes extensively into the Koons case in which Koons took the content of a published photo-altered it somewhat and made a sculpture of it. The photgrapher sued. The photographer won, becasue of the "substantial similarity" of the works and the fact that it was not, according to the judge in the case, parody, which is protected. This decsision says Jaszi, discourages, "appropriational artists" (my term) whose methods "entail reworking pre-existing materials, while rewarding those whose 'dedication to 'originality' qualifies them as truie 'authors' in the Romantic sense" (p.48). In looking at these notions, Jaszi concludes that the "ideology of Romantic 'authorship' however, has greater potential to mislead than to guide decision-makers who will shape the legal regime" as we head into the era of inteernt and all th collaboration and appropriation that takes place there. So, what do you all think? I"ve known some people who specialize in "appropriated art" is it a slug at outmoded notions of capitalism, or should we protect authors, when it may appear the author is a dying breed?

Very Interesting

I guess I did the assignment wrong-so I'm revising it now-but before I summarize the other readings I 'd like to jump off of Kelly's question-Intellectual property becomes an even trickier notion when we consider that the rights to that property can be bought and sold and those who reap the rewards may not always be the creators of the work.


As a person familiar with political economy critiques of mass media I
found the readings , expecially Feather, very informative in looking at how copyright was formed and influenced by powerful political and economic actors, such as the stationers guild-these were very powerful entities in the renaissance/early modern era and they took great pains to protect their monoplies of trade that were granted to them. According to Feather, (p. 195), this was done "to control the ourput of the press, and to ensure that no book was printed unless it was properly liscensed by the censors appointed to the crown." So, in other words, the stationers were given power in a monoploy of their guild to control the ouput of the press in exchange for what the sovereign wanted them to do. In this rubric, authors, were yet another politcal and economic bloc that was beginning to form and press for their share of the pie. Again referring to Feather (p. 209), " The power of the author was soon to be asserted. Men- and a very few women-had been living by their pens since the 16th century." So, this new economic power, the author, was demanding rights over their product. I think people involved in English studies (unless they come from a Marxist perspective, like Terry Eagleton or new historicist, which look at political and cultural contexts) forget that texts are also products and therefore property.
hat
Feather's article neatly coincides neatly coincides with Rose's gripping tale of Pope v. Curll--Pope, it seems wanted to force the issue that was brewing and to which Feather referred to in the era when authors were asserting their property rights as holders of their intellectual property over publishers and collective entities like the stioner's guilds. Pope cleverly played thre law ton instigate a court battle. Ownership of a text, by an author was a novel notion accoridng to Rose, in the early modern era. Texts were act that might "serve to ennoble or immortalize worthy patrons ... they night move audiences to laughters or tears .. they might move men to sedition or heresy" (p.213). Authorship was an act, not a commodity. Pope essentially tricked a publisher, Curll, into publishing correspondence between Pope and Swift, "thereby creating a a situation which would allow him the to protest against the indignity of being exposed in print and at the same time, to open the way for an authorized version" (p.217). Pope won his case, established the primacy of authors as owners of their works and perhaps more importantly, for him, got to have an authorized version of his correspondence published. Well played, Pope!!

Jaszi's and Woodmansee's introduction to our set of readings, lays out some of the field. It is here where we learn of some of the above mentioned forces, like the stationer's guild. We also learn, among other things, that the lionization of the author as sole origninator of a work is a rather recent notion, really strating with the romantics. But the editors go on to say that some of the Romantics didn't really live up to their ideal and show, how for instance, Wordsworth collaborated with Coleridge and even his own sister Dorothy (p. 3). The introduction also raises a current events issue as some forces are advocating an extension (has this comew about yet?) of copyright to 70 years, plus the life of an author. I have heard this critiqued on some talk programs, so I'll quote the concern raised by the editors here about how this fails to square with an economic notion of copyright "justifies protection only insofar as it promotes social welfare by providing an incentive to create and/or distribute new works "(p.5). The concern raised by this trend is that it enforces an absolute property right and makes the cross-polinization of ideas by borrowing almost impossible. The editors use the introudction to lay out this and other issues that will be covered in the boook.

Moving on to the first essay by Woodmansee, she demonstrates how even giants of the early modern age, like Johnson, he was, for a lot of his career is letters, a collaborator (pp.17-20). This despite the fact that helped to create "the modern myth that genuine authorship consists in individual acts of orignination"(p.21). Woodmansee goes on to demonstrate that a lot of writing practices, including those in the information age, are in fact, collaborative. This was of no surprise to me as computer people started the whole "open-source coding" movement, which asserts the collaboration of the writing of code. She ends by saying that the struggle over the assertion of authorship has primarily been an economic one and that our laws assert sole authorship when we know that collaboration occurs so frequently in the creation of works.


MY question in reading thes text is-to what extent should economic and political critiques be applied to the authorship question, particularly seeing that authorship involves questions of property?

Welcome!

Welcome to the class blog for ENGL 758, Composition and Rhetoric: Authorship. It is a place for making sense of the readings--we can fine tune, synthesize, and visualize in class. Each week, after you've completed the readings, please post a blog that does the following things:

* Paraphrases/summarizes the central argument of the book or article(s)
* Identifies at least two primary pieces of evidence the writer uses to support that argument
* Asks at least one productive question regarding the text
* Responds to a classmate's question (if you are not the first to post)

Through summarizing each reading, you both reinforce it for yourself, better preparing yourself for discussion and class writing, and you create notes for yourself and the class.