A Prescriptivist Take on Plagiarism

[alixtii]

The "plagiarism = use without attribution" meme is going around again, and whenever it does, it really, really bugs me because by that standard Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are both plagiarists--and any standard which results in that conclusion is for me a reductio ad absurdum. miriam_heddy has a good post discussing some of the issues here, but there are some things I want to say myself--mostly, I think, in parallel with her. She writes:

Plagiarism, like "technique" is judged not by intent but by effect, hence a writer's arguments that "I didn't mean to plagiarize" or "It was supposed to be a pastiche" aren't relevant when it comes to writing published or put out there to be read by someone other than the author. Or, as Stanley Fish points out with respect to irony not as a "fact" but as a "way of reading": The decision a reader makes will have been possible only in relation to decision procedures that have been authorized by the institution.

I'm not 100% sure whether she is writing in her own voice or merely summarizing a certain paradigm; her post is mostly descriptive, analyzing (quite well) the way "plagiarism" functions as a normative concept differently in academia and in fandom. But it doesn't really matter, because it's the paradigm cited above to which I'm going to respond in this moment as I make my extremely prescriptive argument as to what plagiarism is and is not. Under my view, the claim above isn't wrong so much as it is misleading, and (as miriam_heddy clearly recognizes) parallels issues of author intentionality in general. So I'd accept her use of Fish, but modify it with a use of Foucault (drawing on "What is an Author?").

It's not as simple as "what the author meant" or even "what the reader thinks," but a more complex hybrid: "what the reader thinks the author meant." The author's intentions are very much involved, but only insofar as constructed by the reader, as an author-function. Which was in my mind when I hazarded that perhaps ethics is about constructing a moral-agent function. I say in that post, parenthetically, regarding the then-recent "American President"/reel_sga wank (ETA: see here, courtesy of fairestcat), in which large portions of Sorkin dialogue were used in an SGA fusion:

The most damning facts about the accused parties in the recent cases is the way in which they are reported to have acted after producing the texts, the comments they made which interpretive conventions lead us to read as to having been made in their own voices and thus cause us to construct their intent in a certain way, as being having not made a good-faith effort. I say this without firsthand knowledge. A fact can be damning without being true.

In other words, the problem wasn't that they used other texts in their own without citation, but that when people complimented on those specific passages, they didn't say, "Thanks! Eliot really could write couldn't he?" but instead accepted the praise for themselves. That is the dividing line between allusion and plagiarism, I continue to insist.

I've already made it clear I've posted in this issue before; most recently was here, when I linked to this languagelog post with commentary, which gave the following distinction between plagiarism and allusion (I quoted it even more extensively in my previous post):

That's the subtle line between plagiarism and literary allusion. It's plagiarism if you copy someone's writing and you don't want it to be noticed that you were copying; it's allusion if you do exactly the same but you do want it to be noticed.

Note the reliance on (a readerly construct of?) authorial intent here; what matters is not whether something is noticed or not noticed but whether (we think) the alleged plagiarist wanted the plagiarism to be noticed. She could have misjudged her audience, and expected they would, say, recognize Buffy quotes in a Harry Potter fic, when it turns out they actually don't (what's wrong with them?). (I certainly don't recognize all of Pound's allusions in the Cantos, but that's why I have a trusty compendium--it's my fault for not living up to Pound's rather clear expectations, not his fault for having too high expectations.) I cited the Angel quotes in this XMM fic just to be safe, but I really feel like I shouldn't have had to do that--it was a virtual certainty that my flist would recognize the scene I was paying homage to. I could have been wrong (although judging by the response, I wouldn't have been), but it would still have been in good faith.

Of course, it's fairly easy to construct the intent of an author/moral agent who utilizes a passage from an obscure passage of which no one has ever heard; equally easy is it to construct that of one who uses an instantly recognizable line of Shakespeare. The problematic cases which lie in the grey area between are much harder to judge, but my inclination is always, in the name of increased artistic freedom, to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

miriam_heddy certainly seems to recognize all of this:

if a fanfic story includes dialogue from an episode and a reader doesn't recognize it and praises the writer for coming up with such a clever line, fandom ethics generally dictate that the fan writer write back and say, "Yeah--that was a great line, but it's canon" rather than sit back and accept the praise for a line s/he didn't write.

[. . .]

So what if a fan writer takes a whodunnit plot from a not-so-well-known text and uses it, with little or no modification, as the basis for her television fandom story without giving the plot author credit? If a fan reader says, "Great story!", should the writer (even if the reader make no reference to the plot) catch herself and say, "Thanks!" and then, in the interest of full disclosure, add a note saying, "I borrowed the plot from a novel by ____"? Is it the responsibility of the writer to pre-emptively give credit for all texts from which material was borrowed? Is it enough to just give a blanket "thanks" to that other author without specifying how much of a debt the fanwriter owes to that writer's published text?

Yet miriam_heddy remains in the descriptivist mode; in the end, she seems happy to simply try to more clearly articulate what the fannish mores are which pervail at this socio-historical location:

even though discussions of Cassie Claire's stories may have introduced "pastiche" into the vocabulary of fandom, it hasn't yet been picked up enough that fans regularly recognize and accept and sanction the incorporation of another (non-canon) writer's sentences and paragraphs (as  fans do recognize "remix" and "OTP" and "AU" as legitimate, fannish genres).

I'm not happy with that, because I'm afraid that if Eliot and Pound were in fandom, the fen would burn them in effigy right next to [insert accused plagiarist here], and I'm more than willing to take a normative stance on that as a very bad thing. If we're continuing the paralleling of ethics and literary criticism, my stance can be compared to feminist or post-colonial criticism: readings of a text given to multiple interpretations, but with a strong normative claim about the way we should be reading. There is something specifically deficient and detrimental about a definition of plagiarism as strictly equivalent to mere "use without attribution."

Note that I have no opinion on whether any specific individual is or is not a plagiarist by the standards I suggest (for one thing, I have no experience of their audiences, and thus what those audiences could reasonably be expected to know); I only want to ensure that all individuals are judged by the correct set of standards. The target of people's scorn may well deserve it; but when dishing it out, there's a very real danger in nonetheless painting with too wide a brush.

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

See, I saw Miriam's post to come out with a reader/writer contract where citations and homages were a function of readers' awareness (and I always forget the link to that great essay that addresses just that in terms of when allusions and references become incomprehensible and thus enter dangerous territory...it had a shakespeare quote in the title?).

So, it seems to me that she's not wanting to burn Eliot and pound as much as she'd expect them to know their audience--and the revised wasteland suggests just that, doesn't it?

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

i don't know how the "death of the author" theories apply to nonfiction, so i'm flying blind here.

but to me, as a teacher, i have to go with author's intent. if you steal someone else's work and pass it off as your own because you're too lazy to do the writing yourself, that's plagiarism.

if you quote a line from a song and assume i know the song, that's not plagiarism. but this kind of literary allusion assumes so much between reader and writer, you know?

pastiche is a recognized form of writing, but don't you have to give some kind of author's note or alert that that's the form you're using? like the remixes or the putting your fan characters into a movie plot?

what you said about the reader being supposed to notice the material from the other author is key. if you hope the reader DOESN"T notice, that you can pretend YOU thought it up, that's plagiarism.

i have to explain very carefully to my 18 year olds what is plagiarism and what isn't, and how they can't just go to wikipedia and cut and paste stuff for their paper. they really don't know. so what people get taught is important.

i don't see how you can talk about plagiarism and literary allusions and jazz quoting in solos and pastiches without getting into authorial intent.

*ponders*

[wisdomeagle]

Of course, it's fairly easy to construct the intent of an author/moral agent who utilizes a passage from an obscure passage of which no one has ever heard

Could you clarify this please? I'm really not sure what this kind of passage might be, except I'm pretty sure you don't mean that literally no one has ever heard of it.

[fairestcat]

regarding the then-recent reel_sga wank (anybody have a good citation there? the F_W wiki doesn't have anything), in which large portions of Sorkin dialogue were used in an SGA fusion

My own post on that whole situation can be found here. The post itself is somewhat biased, since I'm the one who reported her, but it links to the mod post over at mckay_sheppard, which has a rather lively discussion from both sides in the comments. The story itself wasn't written for reel_sga by the way, it's just that it was posted around about the same time as those stories, so they naturally came into the discussion.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

First of all, stuff like this is why I have a huge internets-crush on you. As if being a boy-feminist-femslasher wasn't enough, you quote Fish and Foucault in the same paragraph. ♥ Being a wank historian, however, I do feel compelled to comment on this:

She could have misjudged her audience, and expected they would, say, recognize Buffy quotes in a Harry Potter fic, when it turns out they actually don't (what's wrong with them?).

The author you are alluding to was criticized for the Buffy stuff, but the stickiest cries of "plagiarism" are related to her having lifted passages nearly verbatim from a few of Pamela Dean's novels. These books were were, I believe, out of print at the time, so she could not have had a reasonable expectation that her readers would recognize that; nor was it an obscure reference adding allusive meaning for those in the know. (Apparently, of course.)

And this is where the reader's supposition of intent comes in. Did she mean to pass off superior prose as her own creative insight? Is her claim of an eidetic but scatterbrained memory plausible -- do we believe that she "accidentally" reproduced passages of a book she read and reread as a young woman? How would you "prescribe" that we judge her? And do you think the strange social nuances of fandom, wherein BNFs are often deemed patently untrustworthy schemers, should factor in?

Here via <lj user="metafandom">

[chvickers.livejournal.com]

I would be somewhat leery of attributing plagiarism to the duplication of plot elements. If we do that, we have to enshrine Shakespeare as the greatest plagiarist in the English language, since he only created one of the plots of his plays (The Tempest); even many of his historical plays were based on the plots of previous plays and stories about the characters. Hamlet is a prime example.

We also have to be very careful not to confuse plagiarism with copyright violation. One can easily violate copyright without committing plagiarism and vice versa.

[azdaja-dafema.livejournal.com]

(here from metafandom, hello.)

Interesting post. I think that the problem with comparing fiction online with Eliot and Pound (oh I really don't want to be burned at the stake here..) is that their audiences have different references. For example, Eliot references a line from Hamlet. Readers acknowledge line and it helps add another level to the poem in its allusion. Fic-writer references a line of dialogue/text from famous fandom: readers acknowledge line as belonging to something else and a nod to it. Not as familiar with Pound's work, I'd say of Eliot that the fact that his work has so many allusions makes it a multi-lateral read where the text can be read knowing (or not knowing) the allusions - almost as if we are not meant to catch all of them but be pleased with noticing the ones we do. That's why compendiums and guides are so important: so we can see whether the line we so loved should be attributed to Eliot were we to quote him. Another side to this is just how far the references go. My view of plagiarism is that it sticks to few (or one) key sources from which to steal/borrow.

I equate plagiarism with the nicking of passages (ie, more than a sentence) or plots from other books. I think the first is more of a problem, as if you believe some critics there is only a finite amount of plots anyway. The latter is far harder to discern whether to scorn or not though. It's also harder to detect, given the wide breadth of language [writer] could be hijacking.