Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
789-90. dwarves & giants: "implicit in this aphorism is an emphasis on accumulated knowledge," "reverence for the giants, the source, the Authority," and "an endorsement of the practice of imitating the source"; it also "accords to the latest writer the greatest knowledge"
791. descartes & freud are anxious about originality: "writers who want recognition must assert priority; to assert priority is to assert originality; and to assert originality engenders a fear of being robbed" plus "the larger fear that there is no such thing as originality" (meltzer)
792. copyright--we take it for granted & forget to examine how it works and what it does--"obscures the conventionality of literature, the mimetic nature of composition"; king & his "voice-merging" (miller)--"he applied the textual practices of one community to his writing in another"
793. "neither diachronically nor synchronically, then, can authorship be bounded into stable, antipodal categories of mimetic, autonomous, or collaborative authorship. the heterogeneity of theories of authorship, the contradictory definitions that exist simultaneously, render impossible any sort of unitary representation"; but, problematically, "representations of student plagiarism...simplify student authorship, depicting it as a unified, stable field"
795. in reality, authorship--students' along with everybody else's--is complex, changeable, interactive, etc, & the policies don't match the reality, so "we must redefine institutional policies to account for the dialectic"
796. we should also be teaching textual work "not in order to 'prevent' or 'cure' patchwriting but to help students make maximum intellectual use of it and then move beyond it"
797. too often, policy is phrased in (already contradicting) "moral" and "formalist terms" and "may even specifically exclude the writer's intentions, stipulating that plagiarism is plagiarism even if the writer is ignorant of its prohibition"; what is never recognized is that "students may have commendable reasons for engaging in patchwriting, a textual strategy that is commonly classified as plagiarism." instead, new policy needs to account for intention & motivation, for ignorance, experience, & students' ability to decode unfamiliar material & textual conventions
799. "plagiarism takes three different forms--cheating, non-attribution of sources, and patchwriting." cheaters can flunk. non-attributors & patchwriters, if they're doing it intentionally & deceitfully, can also flunk; if they're not, they're midway through a learning process & need teaching, not punishment.
803. what we need to do is "recognize that pedagogical applications of contemporary theory have gone as far as they can within the limitats of now-outdated law. it is time, therefore, to undertake gradual revisions of the law, so that it will reflect rather than obscure the complexities of student authorship"