CCR 720: Pennycook (1996) "Borrowing Others' Words"

Pennycook, A. (1996). Borrowing Others’ Words: Texts, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 201-230.

Executive Summary

Alastair Pennycook is a professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at University of Technology, Syndey. According to his faculty website at UTS, Pennycook is widely published in the field of linguistics, particularly regarding investigations of culture, identity, and language within pop culture, the globalization and colonization of English, TESOL, and, finally, textual policies regarding plagiarism. In accordance with this last topic of inquiry, Pennycook addresses the issue of plagiarism for a TESOL audience in his article, “Borrowing Others’ Words: Texts, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism” (1996). Here, Pennycook attempts to complicate Western ideas of textual borrowing practices in order to propose that writing instructors recognize that “All language learning is to some extent a process of borrowing others’ words and we need to be flexible , not dogmatic, about where we draw boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable borrowings” (227). Instead of acting as detectives searching for illegitimately used language and signs of plagiarism in student writing (p. 203), then, Pennycook proposes that teachers begin to understand that plagiarism is a complex concept, one that has been historically and culturally shaped by Westernized assumptions about textual production, ownership, and learning practices.

Pennycook dedicates most of the article to arguing that definitions of plagiarism are culturally influenced. First, Pennycook exemplifies his argument by historicizing Western ideas of authorship and originality. Explaining how our understanding of plagiarism has been informed by premodern textual practices (where only the divine word of God was written) and modern textual practices (where the inventions of literary writing, printing, and copyright have influenced the belief that to be creative an author must be individual and original), Pennycook goes on to argue that these assumptions about authorship are faulty since we’ve long recognized and accepted textual borrowing and coauthoring practices. In postmodern times, Westerners have acknowledged textual borrowing (i.e. Romans borrowing from Greeks; Benjamin Franklin borrowing tropes and aphorisms; famous plagiarists such as Edgar Allen Poe and Martin Luther King borrowing from other authors), and we have embraced philosophical theories about how language and discourse socially constructs individuals: “We are not speaking subjects but spoken subjects, we do not create language but are created by it” (209). Pennycook questions, therefore, why we are able to recognize the complexities of authorship, textual borrowing, and originality, yet we still treat plagiarism dogmatically in our classrooms.

Pennycook further demonstrates how these textual practices and conceptualizations of authorship are indeed cultural assumptions by comparing such practices to those in Chinese contexts. Although Western thought has influenced much criticism of Chinese learning practices as being backward, simplistic, and countering creativity since they have heavily depended on structured memorization practices, Pennycook reminds readers that Westerners used to value memorization as a learning practice in our not too distant past. Furthermore, Pennycook illustrates that memorization can serve more advanced purposes than rote learning since repetition often leads to a deepened understanding and to new sophisticated ideas about a given concept. Reporting on his interviews with Hong Kong students accused of plagiarism, Pennycook concludes that many students see hypocrisy in the way that (a) they are expected to write without borrowing from sources yet they have not been prepared in their schooling to do otherwise; (b) they observe how their instructors borrow sources during class without citing them yet as students they are not permitted to do the same; and (c) they are charged with not learning a subject when they borrow from other texts yet that’s how they have successfully learned language and other subjects in the past.

Historicizing Western assumptions about authorship, plagiarism, and creativity and drawing on his own research of textual borrowing and memorization practices in Hong Kong, Pennycook concludes “that many of the ways we approach supposed plagiarism are pedagogically unsound and intellectually arrogant” (227). He proposes, then, that instructors treat these issues flexibly, with consideration to the complex backgrounds of our students, and with the recognition that the concepts themselves are too complex to treat dogmatically in the classroom.

Quotable Quotes:

· “Because all language learning is, to some extent, a practice of memorization of the words of others, on what grounds do we see certain acts of textual borrowing as acceptable and others as unacceptable?” (202).

· “Ironically, once the spectre of doubtful ownership is raised, teachers start to look for grammatical errors as a sign of good writing and to become suspicious when such errors are crucially absent….From being teachers constantly in search of sophisticated and standard language use, we become detectives in search of evidence that some chunk of language has been illegitimately used” (203).

CCR 720: Inge (2001) "Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship"

Inge, M. Thomas. "Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship." PMLA 116.3 (May 2001): 623-630.

Executive Summary:

Inge begins his argument by criticizing English and composition for holding on to narrow definitions of authorship—mainly the view that the author works alone and is considered what Stillinger calls a “solitary genius”—despite our recognition that all texts are constructed based on various influences of social and political interactions, including social interactions amongst multiple individuals during composition and revision processes. After providing numerous convincing examples of how prominent literary authors (like Milton, Fitzgerald, and Dreiser) have depended on various individuals (like friends, family, acquaintances, editors, and proofreaders, among others) for writing their famous works, Inge questions why we still deny the extensive social and authorial collaboration occurring during the writing of literary works. Inge posits that our habit of viewing texts as unique works of individual authors (instead of collaborative pieces) falsely substantiates an idealistic view of how literary texts are constructed. He stresses that holding on to this view also negatively promotes the common reaction to and criticism of collaboration as producing less original—and, therefore, less valuable—texts.

Quotable Quotes:

· “there should be a change in attitude about how we discuss our literature and culture so that we do not constantly downgrade authors according to the extent to which they compromise with the pragmatic and economic forces of time and place. We might reconsider the priority we give to what authors think is best for their works, since like parens thay are too often blind to the imperfections of their children. If we allow more for a social and contextual concept of authorship, perhaps we can provide a more realistic and less romantic view of literary production” (630).

· Texts “are the result of any number of discourses that take place among the writer, the political and social environments in which the writing occurs, the aesthetic and economic pressures that encourage the process, the psychological and emotional state of the writer, and the reader who is expected to receive or consume the end product when it reaches print. Even if not intended for an audience or the publishing marketplace, a piece of writing cannot escape the numerous influences that produce it. All discourse is socially constructed” (623).

Citable Sources:

· Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

CCR 720: Eliot (1920) "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Perspecta, Vol. 19 (1982), pp. 36-42. (originally published in 1920).

Executive Summary:

Eliot seems to have two goals in this short piece of literary criticism: 1) to illustrate how literary criticism should not view poets as unoriginal when they call upon or resonate with previously written poetry; and 2) to illustrate how poets themselves must rely on past poetry in their new contexts not in order to produce new ideas, but in order to process and transmit ideas through the poet's understanding and reordering of historical writings in his new era.

The essay is presented in three sections. In the first section, Eliot critiques practices of literary criticism for finding flaws in artists being traditional (in other words, for finding artists unoriginal if they resemble any of their writerly predecessors). Although he acknowledges that blindly following traditions of earlier authors should be discouraged, Eliot argues that a poet’s strongest moments of originality can be identified as his ability to fit in with past work while writing for the modern day. As a consequence of poets being compared to historical works in criticism, of poets having to address historical and social changes over time, and of poets needing to be conscious of the past and presence he writes from and within, Eliot concludes that gaining knowledge about the past will eventual lead to a poet’s abandonment of unique inner-self since he must attend to more important contextual issues of time: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (39).

Second, Eliot posits his “Impersonal theory” as being the mature poet’s ability to use poetry as a means to vary his historical knowledge of poetry into new combinations—a practice where the poet creates art by separating himself from the content, absorbing information and the feelings of others, and then communicating this already authored material in new ways in accordance with new times: "The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (40). In his last section, Eliot concludes by reestablishing his claim that criticism should focus on poetry not the poet and that poets must necessarily surrender themselves to the influences of past works and the present moment in order to successfully produce impersonal art, which he sees as the only way to illustrate true feelings.

Quotable Quotes:

· In this passage, Eliot criticizes literary criticism for praising an author for originality when his work differs from other writers. Eliot counters that a writer’s work can be the most original when he calls upon his predecessors. Thus, Eliot asserts that a shortcoming of literary criticism is:

“our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of is work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects of parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity” (pp. 36-37).

· Eliot argues that writers can never be critiqued as individuals since they rely on those around them for our understanding and critique of them and their work. For me, this has resonance with the scholarly practice of reviewing literature as a means to establish yourself and your argument as a contribution to the field. Besides the quote below, he elaborates on this by referring to how artists must know historical and present day art.

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (37).

Contextual info:

· Eliot is a well known American Nobel Prize of Literature winner, who wrote during the modernism period (publishing between 1915 and 1965). Besides being a literary critic, he was also an author of famous poems and plays such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets. He was born in America but lived in England, and attributes both of his citzenships as being influential to his writing.

· Criticism on Eliot: Eliot has been criticized for his practice of interweaving quotes within his work, and has thus been charged as unoriginal and/or a plagiarist. His defense included recognition of the fragmented nature of writing today, calling attention to his style of juxtaposition to affirm his unique take on things.

· Eliot’s criticisms: According to his short biography on nobelprize.com, Eliot advocated traditional approaches to literature (perhaps related to his religious practices in Christianity). This may be seen as contradictory since he has often been viewed as stemming away from traditional approaches. He has also been suggested to have influenced New Criticism, although he heavily criticized this approach later in his career. You see this echoed in his comments such as “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry” (39), or “It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting” (41), or “To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad” (42).

· Perspecta is a student edited journal published at Yale (The Yale Architectural Journal). The journal publishes new scholars from around the world as well as older theoretical works, but from what I cang gather, it’s themes are dedicated to scholars interested in architecture. I can’t find info online regarding this edition of the journal.