The Fiction of Originality
Podcast:
In “Plagiarism, originality, assemblage,” Johndan Johnson-Eiola and Stuart A. Selber posit the productivity of looking at “texts as assemblages, highlighting the rhetorical dimensions of this articulation and challenging the view that remixed texts are essentially derivative texts, a naïve and uncreative form of plagiarism.” My podcast questions what originality is and whether it is possible. Then I emphasize the importance of teaching and valuing the ways in which we express our ideas rather than the encouragement of original ideas.
(17 votes)
Comments
Define original
Great job with your podcast! I liked that you were able to stay focused on the ideas presented in our reading while linking it with so many other texts. At the end of your podcast you state that this idea of assemblage should influence the way we teach writing, because we should stop stressing originality. I suppose my question when reading the article and when hearing your podcast is, how is original being defined? I agree that if teachers are defining original as a new idea or concept that has never been thought of before, then that idea is preposterous. However, when I have been assigned papers, I have never gotten that impression. My teachers may call something an “original” work, but they have always asked for an assemblage, just a cited assemblage that contains my thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ve always viewed the word “original” to mean that no one has created the text in the way that I have. They may have similar points, similar sources, etc, but my unique compilation and my thoughts make my text original. Therefore, how should this idea change our teaching methods? The article suggests that get rid of attributions and notions of plagiarism. Is this what you suggest as well?
(Small technical issue to be aware of for your next podcast: it was difficult to hear what you were saying even with my volume all the way up. Other than that I thought it was great!)
Christa Weaver
Hey Michael, This was an
Hey Michael,
This was an amazing podcast. It was technically sophisticated with a well-articulated argument. I enjoyed your discussion of Judith Butler, not only because of her not-so-new ideas about gender, but also because of her writing style. Butler is rigorously citational, to the point where it is often difficult to discern where her voice begins and others’ end. I am thinking specifically here of her work in Bodies that Matter, but the same goes for elsewhere in her work. Figuring out exactly what she thought (rather than what she was citing) was one of the challenges I imposed on my reading of her. More productive, then, would be to examine the way she uses assemblage, letting her voice be a matter of the mix, in the given context of her work.
On the note of calling something a “work,” I tend to enjoy that word in the context of our conversation rather than something like her “idea” or her “theory.” “Work” conjures more appropriately the act of an assemblage that is deployed in a specific context, in such a way that it devalues or mutes the problem of “original” scholarship. In response to Christa’s comment, I would caution against trying to fix the term “original” as it so often rests upon words that are just as slippery such as “new” or “innovative” or “creative.” The fact that we are so often using pre-established materials (language, images, etc…) already complicates our notion of “original.” I do agree, however, that the Eilola and Selber overemphasize the hierarchy of originality to a certain degree. They neglect the argument that students often “plagiarize” simply because they are lazy, in order to solidify their claim that students hide their sources because they think their teacher values original thought over effective use of research. I do see you point, Christa, as I think about how common it is to ask our students for what you call a “cited assemblage.” Perhaps, however, our missing component may be the notion of context. Yes, our “unique compilations” do make our works unique in a sense, but I think that we undervalue how they work in a context. Doing so ask us to perform the necessary tasks of understanding the systems through which we distribute works. To bring the point back around, what was it about Butler’s particular assemblage and the given system (or ecology) through which she distributed it, that made her articulation so powerful?
Madeline