Authorship in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literary Studies: November 2004

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?

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?

Authorship in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literary Studies

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

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

Happy Birthday, Laure!

Local Grad Conference, Consider sending your abstracts

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Bloggin' For Venegeance-My Homage To Judas Priest