Book Reviews
Issue 36.1 Spring 2008
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Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education, by Bill Marsh. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. 176 pp.
Reviewed by Arabella Lyon, SUNY-Buffalo
Discussions of plagiarism have taken on a provocative edge. Once plagiarism was seen as shameful, transparent, and not really worthy of analysis. Now, however, scholars envision plagiarism as a nexus of socio-economic forces, an opportunity for redemption, a point of tension in global values and practices, a site of pedagogical and aesthetic possibilities, and the product of a complex legal and cultural history. New research on plagiarism often reveals relationships and possibilities hitherto unimagined. The field progresses rapidly, and at the front edge, Bill Marsh’s Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education asks and answers new questions, engaging recent political events, regulations, and technologies.
Focused on the disciplinary powers of U.S. higher education in the late twentieth and early twenty first century, this intelligent book adds new technological perspectives to a discussion that is often centered on history or students. Engaging many of the familiar features of plagiary in his careful acknowledgements of earlier scholarship, Marsh also analyzes ways in which faculty, administrators, journalists, policy makers, and software entrepreneurs attempt to manage plagiarism through a range of technologies and techniques. In his critique of the apparatus of anti-plagiarism and the media through which plagiarism flows, he would have us see author and plagiarist as a false binary between origin and health, copy and disease. Rather we might understand them better as sides of the same coin, representing different aspects of authoring. While the first two-thirds of the book expose the dualistic traps of plagiarism’s discourse and build a vocabulary and conceptual framework for understanding the tensions surrounding plagiarism and its technologies, the project is at its best in the last two chapters which focus on plagiarism in the age of Internet.
The book begins with the 2002 crimes and scandals involving historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Ambrose had copied passages from copyrighted work, and Goodwin had “closely echoed” sentences from other books. While much of popular and professional culture argues that plagiarism is easy to define, the public discussion in these two cases shows that the problems of definition and punishment are far from clear. In chapter 2, building on the insights of Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault, Marsh historicizes and theorizes definitions of failed authorship and intellectual property, demonstrating the lack of a stable concept of plagiarism through history. The evolution of the rights of original authorship created a dynamic tension between the value of originality and the crime of literary theft, between personal issues of plagiarism and legal issues of copyright infringement. Marsh focuses on plagiarism as an authorial failure of creation that, in turn, interpolates the writer as a “false, fraudulent anti-author” (34). Artists, such as Kathy Acker, may use this position to innovate, but the historical development of intellectual property laws makes it difficult to conceive authorship without property and ownership rights, that is, as other than commodity. Conceiving plagiarism and plagiarism detection as different authoring activities, Marsh characterizes plagiarism detection and remedies as Foucauldian mechanisms which regulate authorship and writing. In the frame of economic and commercial practices, anti-plagiarism technologies control the flow of information. In chapter 3, Marsh connects anti-plagiarism discourse to the emergence of the research paper in the 1920’s, following the enactment of the 1909 Copyright Act. He examines administrative and pedagogical responses to the rise of mass education and the historical trend to diminish student writing and protect “real authors.” The research paper’s growth following the 1909 law suggests two fundamental contradictions. It offers a solution to inadequate student research, but the nature of the genre encourages cut-and-paste. It values origins, but models the student writer as a mediator.
In pivotal chapter 4, Marsh then uses the metaphor of alchemy to discuss models of what real writers do with borrowing. Conceiving plagiarism as “the failure to transmute borrowed copper into gold or, perhaps worse, the deliberate attempt to pass off the base metal as its precious counterpart” (67), Marsh links the concept of plagiarism as a failure to transform a text, medieval alchemy, to humanist notions of perfecting the spirit and mind. From this historical insight, balanced with the author-centered tradition of intellectual property law, he moves, perhaps too quickly, to arguing that new informational practices will require “new breeds of readers and writers, appropriators and plagiarists, mediators and originators (not to mention humanists and individualists)” (89). In the world of copyright laws, university commitments to the creating of a managerial class, and the disciplinary aspirations of composition, research reading and writing requires complicated procedures and technologies as evidenced in the research handbook, a genre in itself which requires particular disciplined reading strategies. In chapter 5, Marsh argues that the guidelines of handbooks, while pretending to clarity and distinction, hide the socio-literate practices of academic communities, reduce the possibility of student alchemists transforming texts, and fail to promote re-contextualization and the practice of writing. In effect, handbooks seem to support authorship, but substitute opaque rules for generative practice. Through analysis of the personal essay as the model address to modernity’s solitary reader, chapter 6 links progressive writing pedagogy to fundamentalist indoctrination, but more importantly it provides a careful discussion of how we understand the process of learning socio-literate, intertextual practices. Building on Rebecca Moore Howard’s concept of “patchwriting” and her description of the process of writing successful summaries, Marsh interrogates the possibility of mapping “the activity of textual incorporation” (117) or what might be better said as the activities of textual incorporation. While acknowledging the gains of contextual pedagogies of research reading and writing, he argues for increased attention to the readerly aspects of writing following the remedial reading approaches prevalent in composition today.
In the last two chapters, Marsh discusses the nature of plagiarism in the age of Internet, compares contemporary plagiarism to earlier versions, and analyzes how plagiarism debates, especially within higher education, have changed in response to the computer age and its technologies of writing. Here the book shifts the horizons of scholarship. Since some studies suggest there is less Internet plagiarism than we believe, Marsh suggests that the change is in professorial willingness to report it and institutions willingness to fight it through assignment reform, rule enforcement, awareness campaigns, focus on academic honesty, education on intellectual property and plagiarism as well as Internet-based solutions. Analyzing four plagiarism detection services, Glatt Plagiarism Services, Essay Verification Engine (EVE2), Plagiarism-finder, and Turnitin.com, the last chapter shows that this new industry attempts to control information flows. Detection services, whether they reduce plagiarism or not, are outsourced education, transferring a teacher’s authority and responsibility to commercial enterprise. They offer “idealized technotopic solution to perennial administrative problems” (145). Internet entrepreneurs, selling papers or selling traps, interpolate students into identities of duplicity or originality and decrease their position as learners in an intertextual literacy. While they situate teachers in role of hunter, using the Internet strategically to find plagiarism, the industry privileges modernism’s conventions of authorship over student writing.
Since new technology raises new questions, Marsh concludes by asking writing instructors to consider what questions about Internet “cheating” and higher education are critical to understanding the deep differences between print and computer literacy. He begins to script answers to several, including “Does Internet plagiarism in the age of post-media composition represent one of the many laudable literacies students with a new ‘communication ability’ bring to the classroom, or is it, as it always has been, a fraudulent or failed venture in the realm of compositional technique, multimodal or otherwise?” (154). While I find that Marsh idealizes the “communication ability” and literacy skills of my “post-media” students and the possibilities of multimodal instruction, the pedagogical dangers of industrial university and the normative assumptions of detection services do call for further investigation and theorization. This book—seemingly focused on plagiarism—takes us to brink of asking and answering questions about intertextuality, the ownership of writing, pedagogy in the industrial university, indeed the ownership of the university. Given the confines of this project, I know it is not fair to ask Marsh to push further, yet that is what I want, what we need as teachers preparing students for new technologies and disciplinary apparatus which we do not yet understand and may have reason to fear. Plagiarism offers an analysis of technologies that is both current and prophetic. I picked up this book to engage in the provocative pleasures of plagiarism, but I come away worried about capitalist forces coming to bear on student writing.
Buffalo, New York
