Cinnabar and Alabaster

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January 24, 2006

marxisistic (authorship 26.2/25)

Eagleton, Terry. "The Author as Producer." Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley: U California P, 1976. 59-76.

1 sentence summary:art like other things & lit like other art isn't a miracle born out of nothing (individual genius) but is a produced (social) commodity; marxist theorists have different ways of theorizing authorship within this frame.

passages:
68. "for brecht and benjamin, the author is primarily a producer analogous to any other maker of a social product. they oppose...the romantic notion of the author as creator--as the god-like figure who mysteriously conjures his handiwork out of nothing. such an inspirational, individualist concept of artistic production makes it impossible to conceive of the artist as a worker rooted in a particular history with particular materials at his disposal."
69. for marx & engels "to divorce the literary work from the writer as 'living historical human subject' is to 'enthuse over the miracle-working power of the pen.' once the work is severed from the author's historical situation, it is bound to appear miraculous and unmotivated"; "pierre macherey is equally hostile to the idea of the author as 'creator.' for him, too, the author is essentially a producer who works up certain given materials into a new product. the author does not make the materials with which he works: forms, values, myths, symbols, ideologies come to him already worked-upon....macherey is indebted here to the work of althusser," whose definition of "practice" means "'any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using a determinate means of "production").' [9] this applies, among other things, to the practice we know as art. the artist uses certain means of production...to transform the materials of language and experience into a determinate product. there is no reason why this particular transformation should be more miraculous than any other. [10]"
70. lukács: "ragards the literary work as a 'spontaneous whole' which reconciles the capitalist contradictions between essence and appearance, concrete and abstract, individual and social whole. in overcoming these alienations, art recreates wholeness and harmony. brecht, however, believes this to be a reactionary nostalgia. art for him should expose rather than remove those contradictions...the works should not be symmetrically complete in itself, but like any social product should be completed only in the act of being used."
74. in marxist criticism art, while it has been "converted into a commodity and warped by ideology...can still partially reach beyond those limits. it can still yield us a kind of truth--not, to be sure, a scientific of theoretical truth, but the truth of how men experience their conditions of life, and of how they protest against them. [16]"; "there is, however, an obvious danger inherent in a concern with art's technological basis. this is the trap of 'technologism'--the belief that technical forces in themselves, rather than the place they occupy within a whole mode of production, are the determining factor in history. brecht and benjamin sometimes fall into this trap; their work leaves open the question of how an analysis of art as a mode of production is to be systematically combined with an analysis of it as a mode of experience. what, in other words, is the relation between 'base' and 'superstructure' in art itself?"

Posted by ttobryan at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)

reality-check economics (collaborative writing 48.2/50)

Hurlbert, C. Mark. "The rhetoric of possessive individualism." 1988. ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 296 341

1 sentence summary: both the "process" and "product" approaches to teaching composition rely on constructions of students as individuals who will be rewarded individually for individually-created works in ways that promote an economy of reward and privilege that unrealistically represents the realities of our society's late capitalism.

passages
3. "according to c.b. macpherson, 'possessive individualism' is the seventeenth-centruy view that the right to possession is the keystone to human freedom. the individual is a free agent in the economic and political market place, able to enter into relations where he or she wills, capable of making his or her own decisions, sole authority for the exchange of goods that he or she produces. in this scheme, the individual possesses natural rights to liberty, privacy, self-development and self-reliance, as well as social and self-responsibility, because he or she possesses property and goods. to put this another way, just as possession is the soruce of privilege, privilege is the result of possession. failure to own is a mark of disgrace, of a lack of initiative, a reason for being powerless and subjugated." of course, the 17th-cent. is over: "in late-capitalist market places, individuals are not self-determined; they are controlled by capital relations to which most never gain access"; nonetheless "the theory of possessive individualism and the liberal democratic ideals it sanctions do not seem to be in danger of being reputed"
4. the terms of the product/process debate "have hindered useful, even necessary, discussion because, as any comprehensive survey of composition texts and theories will demosntrate, one person's product' approach to writing instruction is another person's 'process' approach";
5. even more important than their definitions & their differences are their similarities, esp. "their mutual reliance on the theory [of] possessive individualism": in the product approach, "students are conceived of as individual interpreters and creators of discourse" & "the relative success or failure of their writing is their affair. after all, they are the ones who must decide [to] apply themselves and 'fix' their errors for they are always obliged to 'own' the grades that they…'get.'" & "grades are more than mere statements of student performance, they are also harbingers of future economic success….and because ownership is linked to honor or disgrace in the ideology of possessive individualism, grades imply the extent to which students are deserving of the rights shared by all market-participating individuals. the fact is that grades are currently, however much educators profess otherwise, statements about the worth of individual students"
6. particularly in product classrooms, "grades…are based not on what students have written, but on a subjective assessment of how they have written it. this form of assessment…affronts a student's dignity as a maker of meaning because their relationship to the meaning that they make is undermined, resulting in alienation and statements like 'i can't write'"; process theories, alternately, "because they seek to authorize students to be writers…do much to restore the dignity of students by automatically inviting them to join as equal members, or at least pretending to do so, of the discourse community of the composition classroom"—yet still "with its entailed neo-kantian, romantic views of the individuality of writers, its conception of the solitary nature of the composing pfocess, and with its valorization of privacy and self-expression, the 'process' approach conceives, like the 'product' approach, though for different reasons, of students as individual creators of discourse" who "are responsible for the texts they make"
7-8. & the grades still arrive & mark students' worth. he doesn't advocate anarchy as a solution, "but we may still productively ask ourselves what sort of social order it is that we are seeking to advance," as currently "our curricula support the promise of upward mobility for possessive individualists at a time when economic realities suggest that upward mobility is a myth and possessive individualism is valid for early, not late, capitalistic societies": or, in other words, get real: "we are currently beginning to recognize how meaning is produced in social, rather than individual, processes, yet as they are currently constructed, our composition curricula seem to protect the individual right to possess meaning. this incongruity leads me to believe that without an understanding of how our rhetorics reflect economic ideologies, we may never know what we are helping our students to achieve"

Posted by ttobryan at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2006

300 laps, finis.

ask me today, & i'm done.

(there's 1 ERIC document still on my list that i haven't yet tried to ferret out of the library's microfilm collection, 1 book out on recall, & 1 book lost that illiad's supposed to be acquiring for me, [edit, dammit: & one more illiad chapter] but none of them are HERE. i have read everything that is here. all of it. OMG.)

300 is the ballpark # i told cordell & jason for how many pages of notes i was going to end up with for this project. 300 is today's page-count for the word file i backed up the notes from this blog into.

48 "books" in collaborative writing, 27 in authorship, & 27 in genre.

boo-yah.

Posted by ttobryan at 04:37 PM | Comments (2)

doctor amy says (authorship 27/25)

Robillard, Amy E. Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority: Co-Investigation and Representations of Student Writers in Composition Studies. Diss. Syracuse University, 2004.

1 sentence summary: by inviting students to co-investigate the nature of authorship & their own authority as students & writers we can help overcome the cultural split between students and Authors that undermines the validity & relevance of the work they do.

passages
5. despite writing for a newspaper for a year, "or maybe because of it--because i had had the experience of seeing my name in print and still being the same person i had been all along--i never really considered myself an author. publication didn't change me the way i assumed it changed an author.
10. definitions: "throughout this project, i use the term 'author' to signify a commonplace understanding of the term: one who writes with originality, autonomy, morality, and proprietorship"; "for the most part, when i use the term 'author,' i mean what foucault means by the 'author-function.' an author is not a flesh-and-blood human being; an author is instead ephemeral. part of the purpose of this project is to point to the cultural baggage that accompanies the term 'author' because i believe that composition studies' adoption of the term is problematic."
15. more definitions: "i define co-investigation as the cooperative study of an issue of concern to all parties. all parties have experience and knowledge to contribute to the study, experience and knowledge that shapes and reshapes the questions and objects of that investigation. i make no claims of equality...as the teacher involved in the present study, i exercised an institutional form of authority and i exercised power that was not available to the other members..."
18. foss & foss's useful definitions: "'experiential expertise'--expertise based on knowledge of personal experience" vs. "'presentational expertise'--expertise based on the selection and representation of experience, an expertise that has traditionally been associated with the researcher rather than the researched"
20. the difference: "whereas critical pedagogy aims to empower students with critical knowledge that the teacher already possesses, co-investigation aims to engage students in questions to which teachers do not already know the answers"
23-4. our positionality only enables us to do so much: "while teachers may have the power to grant students some degree of institutional authority in the classroom, they do not have the legitimizing power to authorize students as writers" & a conception of authority as grant-able--power the powerful can choose to share--"fails [in this context] because it rests on the assumption that teachers possess the requisite cultural authority to authorize others. my institutional authority in the writing classroom enables me perhaps to empower students as institutional agents, but it does not enable me to empower students as writers. my institutional authority in the writing classroom can position me as a beneficent teacher working to empower students in an institution designed to keep students in their place. but a student's writerly authority comes not from my sanctioning of her writing--though my sanctioning of her work or my belief in the value of her work certainly is part of the writing's symbolic production....i cannot, as a teacher, authorize a student's writing as anything other than student writing."
38. "despite composition studies' professed agenda of forwarding student empowerment, the field has been slow to acknowledge the workings of an author/student binary informing so much of the work we do with students and their writing. like any other binary, the first term, author, holds the elevated position of dominance, while the second term, student, holds the position of the dominanted. where authors are required to be original, students who write are often required 'not to be original. a student's job is to comprehend and repeat the ideas of others. yet, paradoxically, students are required to be autonomous in their writing' (howard, 'binaries' 2)."
39. the binary in (robie's version of) crowley: "where an author's text could be described as timeless because of its universality, a student's text could be described as timeless because it is 'expendable'...because of its status as practice for the 'real thing.' if an author is ephemeral, a student is a very real material presence in the classroom. and, if an author is presumed to be possessed of morals, a student is immoral, ready and willing to steal the words of others at the first opportunity"
44. & building off brodkey, "it is not enough simply to replace the masculine transcendent author in the garret with an image of a writing student or of a favorite female author."
47. on joe harris's statement in Cs: his policy "is based on the notion that 'professional' authors have control over their work after it is published" so that "textual control becomes one of the boundaries that separates student from author, via the assumption that students need a kind of protection that authors themselves are rarely afforded. citation of one's work--positive or negative--is a mark of respect for any writer; it means, after all, that one's work has been read and has been deemed worthy of response"
48. in her own treatment of students' work: "by treating hickel as an author whose work is worthy of discussion, i am according him the respect that accompanies any citation, be it supportive or antagonistic. in contrast, creating a separate class of citation for students, as harris suggests and as we've been doing for decades now, places them outside the economy of citation, depriving them of the possibility that their writing might provoke agreement or disagreement"
49-50. as trimmer points out, "to remain the heroes of teaching narratives, we must construct the student as deficient, as needing our help. to construct the student as deficient is ultimately to construct ourselves as equally deficient, for we are and have historically been identified with the low status of those we teach"--so treating them as kids is so easy it's almost automatic.
53-4. foucault's 4 characteristics, according to amy who can count better than he can: "the author-function
1. is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses;
2. does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture;
3. is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; and
4. does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subject positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy"
55. "like the author-function, the student funciton does not 'operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times.' there are exceptions to all of the patterns that i will claim make up a student function in composition scholarship, but it is their status as exceptions that prove the existence of a student function. the student function, too, is defined 'through a series of precise and complex procedures'--the patterns informing composition's treatment of students and their writing. and finally, the student function, like the author-function, 'does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual'; the student of the student function...refers not to an actual person but to a timeless, sexless beginner, a nameless stand-in for the individual students we teach."
59. "readers want to know everything they can about an author as a person--what he eats for breakfast, how and where he writes best, how many lovers he took while writing the book that made him famous. yet teachers want to know next to nothing about the biography of a student writer as a writer. many teachers prefer to keep 'him' ageless, sexless, timeless. pass him, move on to the next group of students next semester"
60. "the discourse of the student function is deeply engrained in our work; it will take much more than simply reversing the Author/student binary to effect a change in the way our disicpline perpetuates the student function."
61. "our perceptions of students as transients, often realized in our public expressions of delight at facing an entirely new group of students each semester, allow--even encourage--us to perpetuate the student function. why not keep our students anonymous, keep complaining about them, keep describing them as the opposite of professional writers (whose functions, in their roles as authors are anything but transient) when we know we don't have to deal with them after this semester?"
75. the goal: to "begin to represent students as social, historical, political, gendered, complicated people in stories that go beyond the binary of author/student"
80. no proponent of artificial authorization, robillard argues instead for "approach[ing] student writing as student writing--with all that entails for student authorship, legitimation, and rhetorical situation--rather than working to authorize student writing by addressing it to 'real' audiences. approaching it [in this way] means readin git for what it might teach us about writing in the university rather than reading it as the writing of 'authors.' it means acknowledging students as contributors to our knowledge-making"
85-6. in the bartholomae/elbow debate "elbow argues for treating students as writers as opposed to treating students as academics. because the debate sets up binary oppositions--and is regularly cited in composition studies as representing binary positions--what is often overlooked are not only the assumptions about authorizing student writers but an early challenge to those assumptions. reread through the lens of student authorship, bartholomae's challenge to the process movement's discourse of empowerment not only provides a new vision of the well-known debate but also shows another way in which that debate represents a central moment in the history of composition theory"--"authority, as represented in bartholomae's illustration, is a quality that teachers posses, that they can give to others. this begs the question--do teachers have to--can teachers--relinquish the authority they bring to the classroom in order that students may posses writerly authority?": this "raises specific questions about how we understand students' textual authority. what or who can authorize a student as a writer? how does attention to one's cultural, historical, social, material situation function in the production of text? how does the ideology of the autonomous author contribute to a student's understanding of herself as a writer?"
95. "if we think of composition studies as a field of cultural production and if we recognize that teachers cannot grant students authority as writers because the kind of authority that teachers possess is primarily institutional, it is worth considering how the field of composition studies...is premised on the tension between cultural capital and economic capital"; "if we conceive of writing skills as primarily a form of economic capital, it makes sense to encourage students to seek authority as writers from audiences other than the teacher, for these are the kinds of audiences that they will be required to address once they enter the 'real world.' if, however, we conceive of writing as a way of knowing...we are less likely to focus our attention on the world outside the classroom" (& what do we know about the "real world" anyway?): "we might think of scholars in composition as participating in a field of restricted production. we write primarily for other composition scholars. our work is only granted value by virtue of its being authorized by others in the field"
150. "at the same time that composition studies wants to use autobiographical writing as a way to authorize student writing early in a required writing course--to establish them, however briefly, as authors--the field limits its representations of studen autobiographical writing to examples that illustrate 'voice' or 'authenticity'"--& this starkly limits the sorts of contributions to our knowledge we allow them to make.
169-70. "our scholarly representations of students--as well as students' expectations about our representations of students--affect their perceptions of themselves as writers or as non-writers. students cast themselves and the authors of their assigned texts in familiar power relationships in two significant ways....many students referred to themselves by first name only yet referred to the authors by last name only. secondly, the assignment explicitly asks students to include an alphabetical cast of characters. while some students left themselves off of the list altogether, others put themselves last on the list despite my request that they include their own names alphabetically. students' obedience to the hierarchy of teachers over students superseded their obedience to the requirements of this teacher--me--and to the assignment i'd created"
172. the problem of conflation: "in 'writing and Writing,' crowley points to the concept of 'author-ity' as that which distinguishes poststurctural approaches to texts and current-traditional approaches to texts. 'author-ity' to crowly is 'the relative appropriation of privilege by a text through the agency of its author's name' (94). the problem with crowley's term is that it enfolds the term 'author' into 'authority' unproblematically....an author is more than one who writes with authority. simply referring to students as authors in the scholarship does not change the authority with which they write for their teachers or for 'real-world' audiences."
173. in her class, "authority replaced author as the object of inquiry because authority was something we could discuss and debate with relatively little symbolic capital at stake. as members of this culture, each of us in the classroom held dear the notion of the autonomous, originary author in ways that made challenges to that notion difficult....as a group, we did not find ourselves so attached to a notion of authority as autonomous....even more significantly, students and i found it easier to discuss their authority over their writing rather than their authorship of their writing because 'authority' is a term that can apply to any writer, while authorship applies only to those who have been published or who make a living from their writing."

Posted by ttobryan at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2006

leci n'est pas (authorship 26.1/25)

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Donald Bouchard, Ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.

this is not a summary: last night i explained, quite coherently, i thought, the "author-function" to our friend cordell, beginning and ending with a chinese menu as an example of a textual object that has at some point by someone been "authored" but is not in any way representative of the "author-function" (i.e. it doesn't have an "Author") & taking a circuitous route through discussions of William Shakespeare, Quentin Tarantino, and the culturally-acknowledged author-function of the Walt Disney corporation. i tried convincing my husband that this counted as proof that i understood the idea well enough that i didn't have to keep reading foucault, but he was having none of it, & thus the notes that follow.

passages:
114-5. the guiding question here: "why did i use the names of authors in the order of things" if he didn't intend to explain & be held accountable for everything those authors' work might mean, imply, connect to, complicate? the answer, he says, will show up somewhere else; what's interesting to this essay is "the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figured who is outside and precedes it"
117. cultural context & (?) that whole barthes business (?): "we find the link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer; the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. if we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing"
118. "the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change"; killer questions: "what is necessary to its composition, if a work is not something written by a person called an 'author?'"; "if an individual is not an author, what are we to make of those things he has written or said, left among his papers or comunicated to others?"; "assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said...to be included in his work?....if we wish to publish the complete works of nietzshce, for example, where do we draw the line?...can we agree on what 'everything' means?" & what about his laundry lists?
119-20. the mystical "notion of écriture"--which "stands for a remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment" but not "the act of writing nor the indications, as symptoms or signs within a text, of an author's meaning"..."has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity. the extremely visible signs of the author's empirical activity are effaced to allow the play, in parallel or opposition, of religious and critical modes of characterization. in granting a primordial status to writing, do we not, in effect, simply reinscribe in transcendental terms the theological affirmation of its sacred origin or a critical belief in its creative nature?"
121. so what? "it is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; god and man died a common death. rather, we should reexamine the empty space left by the author's disappearance....in this context we can briefly consider the problems that arise in the use of an author's name? what is the name of an author? how does it function?" (& he has no answers, of course); "obviously not a pure and simple reference, the proper name (and the author's name as well) has other than indicative functions. it ismore than a gesture, a finger pointed at someone; it is...the equivalent of a description" and "a proper name has other functions than that of signification: when we discover that rimbaud has not written la chasse spirituelle, we cannot maintain that the meaning of the proper name and the name of an author oscillate between the poles of description and designation, and...they are not totally determined either by their descriptive or designative functions"
122. "the link between a proper name and the individual being named and the link between an author's name and that which it names are not isomorphous and do not function in the same way"--things we found out about a person we think of as an author could change our impressions of him/her as a person but not an author or as an author but not a person.
123. "these differences indicate that an author's name is not simply an element of speech....its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification" doing 3 things: it "can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others"; it "establishes different forms of relationships among texts"; & it "characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse"; from another perspective, "unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts--separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence. it points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. the author's name is not a function of a man's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence"
124. therefore "in our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and...an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author"; "in dealing with the 'author' as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its difference from other discourses." 4 features characterize "only those books or texts with authors": (1) "they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago"
125. (2) "the 'author-function' is not universal or constant in all discourse....the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call 'literary' (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author"
127. (3) "this 'author-function'...is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. it results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension as we speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power....nevertheless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author...are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts" (& where's 4?)
128. st. jerome's 4 "norms" that "will disclose the involvement of several authors" or give away inconsistencies in an author's presentation: (a) consistent quality, (b) expressed ideas don't disagree, (c) "stylistic uniformity," & (d) a lack of anachronistic disconnects; in modern criticism the same concerns appear
129. but it's more complicated: "it would be false to consider the function of the author as a pure and simple reconstruction after the fact of a text given as passive amterial, since a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author" (pronouns etc.)
130-1. "the 'author-function' is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and imply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy."
131. "even within the realm of discourse a person can be the author of much more than a book--of a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate....we could say that such authors occupy a 'transdiscursive' position" such that "the distinctive contribution of these authors is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts"
132. his examples, "marx and freud, as 'initiators of discursive practices,' not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but...they also made possible a certain number of differences. they cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated"
137-8. why he cares: in addition to helping categorize discourse, "the 'author-function' could also reveal the manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships"; thus questions about who exactly the subject/author/originator is are less useful/important/valuable than these:
"'what are the modes of existence of this discourse?'
'where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?'
'what placements are determined for possible subjects'
'who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?'"

Posted by ttobryan at 07:11 PM | Comments (1)

re-reading syllabi (authorship 24.3/15)

Fuller, Mary J., and Jean Ann Lutz. "Constructing Authority: Student Responses and Classroom Discourse." Discourse Studies in Composition. Eds. Ellen L. Barton and Gail Stygall. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002.

1 sentence summary: the authors find upon analysis of their own language use and students' responses to survey questions that their presentations of authority--as perceived--weren't in line with--or nearly as simple and clear-cut as--the impressions they intended to be making.

passages
357. "just how complicated these notions of authority might be": "our female colleagues tell us that students are sometimes upset when they discover that their teachers enforce late paper penalties, whereas our male colleagues enforce the same such penalties with less student complaint. the students in male-taught and 'male-marked' classes seem simply to expect that class policies will be enforced....grade grievances are brought more often against women than men (roughly three to one), and many of them involve the students' anger at their teachers who enforced late penalties and attendance policies and reflected these in final grades. in female marked classes, we surmised, students believed that they wouldn't be held to those policies, even if those policies were clearly outlined in the syllabus"
360-1. why the heck not?!? who in the world would discussing & negotiating questions injure? --> "complying with IRB requirements about the interactions of teachers and students meant that we could not, as feminist qualitative research encourages, negotiate our questions with our students and refine them as we went along"
370-1. "when we analyzed our syllabi...we saw more clearly the spaces in which we acknowledged or even touted our authority and the comparable spaces in which we decided to give it away. what became most clear in this analysis is that we were in control. empowered as we are by the institution in which we work, the positions that we hold, and the imbalance of power in the student-teacher relationship, we were the ones who determined what authority to exhibit and when. maybe our classrooms were, more than we had realized, marked male....as we listened to our tapes and read our transcripts, we were at first disconcerted to find that we not only [sic] exhibited authority, but that our students sensed this authority, expected it, and even embraced it. most importantly, their interpretation of our stance was the deciding factor in how we were 'marked.' sometimes they found authority in spaces where we meant to give it up, and other times they sought authority in places where, despite our attempt to negotiate shared responsibility, they expected us to be unyielding....they claimed confusion: they saw that sometimes we were authoritarian; sometimes we were not"; ultimately "we found...that even when we consciously attempted to be nonauthoritarian, we punctuated our approachability with authoritarian moves....and we found, that in our attempts to be nonauthoretarian, students sometimes interpreted us as nurturing, sometimes as irritating"

Posted by ttobryan at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2006

our background (collaborative writing 48.1/50)

Berlin, James. "Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class" College English 50.54(1988) 77-494.

1 sentence summary:rhetoric is inherently ideological; we've foregrounded different ideologies through our different approaches to teaching it.

passages:
478. "the rhetoric of cognitive psychology refuses the ideological question altogether, claiming for itself the transcendent neutrality of science"; by contrast "expressionistic rhetoric...has always openly admitted its ideological predilections" & "social-epistemic rhetoric is ...self-consciously aware of its ideological stand"
482-2. in cognitive rhetoric: "the real is the rational," "the world is correspondingly structured to foreground goals inherently worth pursuing--whether these are private or professional, in writing or in work," "the mind is happily structured to perceive these goals and, thanks to the proper cognitive development of the observer--usually an expert--to attain them"; of course, "some are better at using them than others. these individuals inevitably distinguish themselves, rise up the corporate ladder, and leave the less competent and less competetive behind."
484. & "certain structures of the material world, the mind, and language, and their correspondence with certain goals, problem-solving heuristics, and solutions in the economic, social, and political are regarded as inherent features of the universe, existing apart from human social intervention"--as "indisputable scientific facts"
485. expressivist rhetoric, on the other hand, believes in the "original language" of all writers' selves, which "can be studied by others to understand the self and can even awaken in readers the experience of their selves. authentic self-expression can thus lead to authentic self-experience for both the writer and the reader....whether the writer is creating poetry or writing a business report"; "from this perspective, power within society ought always to be vested in the individual."
487. "for expressionistic rhetoric, the correct response to the imposition of current economic, political, and social arrangements is thus resistance, but a resistance that is always construed in individual terms. collective retaliation poses as much of a threat to individual integrity as do the collective forces being resisted, and so is itself suspect. the only hope in a society working to destroy the uniqueness of the individual is for each of us to assert our individuality against the tyranny of the authoritarian corporation, state, and society" (& it doesn't really resist like it feigns to--"after all, this rhetoric can be used to reinforce the entrepreneurial virtues captialism most values: individualism, private initiative, the confidence for risk-taking, the right to be contentious with authority"
488-9. and third, currently, most relevantly, "for social-epistemic rhetoric, the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence," knowledge-making is an ongoing activity undertaken by "a transcendent self," & "the subject is itself a social construct that emerges through the linguistically-circumscribed interaction of the individual, the community, and the material world"

Posted by ttobryan at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

where we come from (authorship 24.2/25)

Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 22 (1971): 243-50.

1 sentence summary: imitation--as both a key theoretical element and set of practices--was fundamental to ancient rhetoric, in many ways that correspond to activities we still occasionally conduct--but with less intentionality and less pervasiveness--in today's classrooms.

the point:
the desired product of a (writer's) rhetor's work wasn't always conceived of in ways that isolate authors and their ideas from all others in service of the god of originality; classically rhetors learned to do what they do from the works of others, and were expected to--not critiqued for--trying on the words of others, practicing their patterns and approaches, and absorbing (sometimes by way of direct memorization) in order to use, the language of their forebears.

(do i really need to quote bits to make this point?)

Posted by ttobryan at 08:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2006

letters from africa (collaborative writing 47/50)

Rouse, John, and Edward Katz. Unexpected Voices: Theory, Practice, and Identity in the Writing Classroom. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2003.

1 sentence summary: rouse's & katz's collection of letters documents a discussion of pedagogy & philosophy across international & cultural borders that draws attention to western assumptions about identity and individuality & their alien nature in other contexts.

passages
174. "sometimes i wonder just what moral issues might arise in the provocative class you talk about, where students are not being instructed, they're acting and reacting. or is it foolish to think that some sort of ethical awareness might arise there? among the africans there's often an ethical obligation given in their names, as i've said, so individuals are constantly reminded of what they owe the family or community. in fact, one of the african lecturers told me that when students here write 'personally,' they do not in fact tell about their individual selves so much as about the experiences of others like them in the community. they're more sociocentric than egocentric"
181. "to 'correct' the language [of a writer's narrative] would be to place both reader and writer at a considerable remove from events, as though the person speaking to us in the story were much older and looking back with a mind now educated. and yet, are there some changes in language that would improve the effectiveness of the story? these are interesting considerations, it seems to me, and taking them up with young people would get them to thinking about language in a more sophisticated way. they would be learning, for example, that there is a difference between the one who speaks on the page and the one who has written those words--words that may have once been spoken, many of them, when others were first told the story but now in writing have become a voice apart. and the writer is expected to be in control of that voice"
182. "now, even if they decide the language should remain entirely unchanged, they are evaluating it according to a different standard than that or their ordinary speech, a more formal or 'academic' standard. and they are internalizing that standard even as they decide against it. however, to internalize a different or 'higher' standard of language is to develop a feeling of dissatisfaction with one's present life situation (for a different standard of language implies a different standard for the way one is to live)."
184. "so we feel this pressure to do the safe academic thing, to teach various forms and terms--what your colleagues call the metalanguage of thesis, assumption, literal/figurative and the like--while saying in effect, this will all be useful to you later on....our work must have value in the moment if our young people are to be fully engaged with it, so we have very little talking to do and no promises to make. we work along with them, hoping to hear the unexpected voice. we are not going to hear it, however, so long as students think of themselves as lower, as those who only do as another directs. then our meeing is one-sided and alienates not only person from person but inner aspects of a single individual. the learner has no cause for drawing together various parts of the self, no particular expressive need....so let our meeting be a many-sided event, a meeting with individuals who make a difference for themselves through the decisions they make"
194. the value (& ubiquity) of narrative: "one story these young people are living is the adventure of their entrance into the symbolic system of the academic world and learning there the language of academic discourse....much academic writing is the recounting of history. or an academic article may introduce the work of some writer, then another who contradicts the first, and a drama of ideas is set in motion, often with anecdotal asides. in fact, much writing that is not ordinarily thought of as story has a narrative progression which provides a frame for the inclusion of facts, analysis, and commentary. academic discourse in general is a specialized kind of narrative"..."has anyone in composition studies noticed how important personal narrative has recently become in the social sciences? there has been a dispersal of authority, so to speak, and research reports often include the voices [of] their subjects, who become participants in the study rather than simply exhibits"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:45 PM | Comments (2)

boyz in the garret (collaborative writing 46/50)

Koestenbaum, Wayne. Double talk : the erotics of male literary collaboration. New York : Routledge, 1989.

1 sentence summary: the work of many historical male collaborative pairs involves an erotic element if not reveals more about the nature of their working & personal relationships--the interactions that made their writing possible--than would be understandable without this critical lens.

passages:
1. "certain readers doubtless believe that conceptions should spring from a single mind, and that collaborative works are promiscuous and unnatural. like bastards in king lear, these mongrel texts come from no centered position in a moral universe; they evoke uncertainty and condescension in a reader who demands to know at all moments a sentence's source"
2. "men who wrote a book together, it seemed, could not avoid an embarrassing transparency; i presumed that collaborative texts could not help spilling secrets that singly authored works had the composure to hide"; "a double signature confers enormous interpretive freedom: it permits the reader to see the act of collaboration shadowing every word in the text. collaborative works are intrinsically different than books written by one author alone; even if both names do not appear, or one writer eventually produces more material, the decision to collaborate determines the work's contours, and the way it can be read. books with two authors are specimens of a relation, and show writing to be a quality of motion and exchange, not a fixed thing. whether we call the will that produces a collaborative work inspiration, authority, or diligence, this 'will' is shared, sometimes miserably."
4. "double authorship...is not the only feature these disparate texts share. certain desires and dreads regularly follow in [its] wake"; the texts in this study reflect "not literary collaboration in general" but "a cohesive wave in literary and cultural history" mostly btw. 1885 & 1922.
5. "this system is, in essence, feminist: it questions heterosexuality's privilege and forces masculine writing to take seriously the threat of 'queerness.' deconstruction has taught us that any monolithic body of ideas and habits contains the very difference it condemns; within male texts of all varieties lurks a homosexual desire which, far from reinforcing patriarchy, undermines it, and offers a way out."
8-9. "double writing is both a dispersive and a retentive procedure..." but" i believe that double authorship attacks not primarily our dogmas of literary proerty, but of sexual propriety"; "i can describe collaboration as a disruptive act only if i retain a conservative allegiance to singular authority. however, i allow for meanings that authors might never have intended; a collaborative text exhibits (shameful) symptoms of double authorship, despite the men's desire to make the work seem the product of one mind."
139. by 1922, when the waste land had emerged, its double authorship concealed, male collaboration had already earned a reputation for perversity."
160. barrie's opinion occludes the possibility, in denial of the same key: "collaboration in fiction, indeed, is a mistake, for the reason that two men cannot combine so as to become one"
165. link btw. "group sex and group writing"

Posted by ttobryan at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)

(not really) zombies! (collaborative writing 45.3/50)

Peters, John Durham. "John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 75.4 (1989) 387-399.

1 sentence summary: our notion of the individual and the role of the individual in communicative interaction with other individuals (and/vs. with the larger social) is entirely locke's philosophical fault (but not the zombies).

passages:
387. "central to both the theories and practices of liberalism is the rift between individual and society" which "fundamental and rarely acknowledged division defines the conditions in which 'communication' can be imagined"; "for theorists, the problem of communication is how to reconcile individual creativity in meaning-making with the social and public nature of meaning's materials (culture and language)"; "communication appeals to us because of the way the concept seems to put humpty dumpty back together again"--it's "a description of the flowering of the private into the public, the overcoming of divisions of subject/object"
388. ..."the elusive betwixt-and-between quality" of which scholars dealing with have "usually retreated into a language of mystery and miracle" to discuss--dewey gives it "the job of mediating between matter and mind, nature and imagination"; according to moscovici "the individual is one of the most important inventions of modern times. individuality is a political, legal, religious, and scientific creation possible only in a constellation of specific social conditions. the individual becomes a sovereign lord over his or her own life only as the social fixation of status and station recedes."
389. "locke's individualism extends from his politics to his linguistics: for him the individual (and not society, language, or tradition) is the master of meaning, which makes common understanding between individuals both desperately urgent and highly problematic"; "central is his 'idea' idea. an idea, according to locke, is an 'immediate object of the Mind, which it perceives and has before it distinct from the sound it uses as a sign of it'"--he puts this term "to a bewildering variety of uses...but it is the basic unit of his [empiricist] epistemology": "all genuine knowledge can be ultimately traced to simple ideas that have passed into the mind through the inlets of the senses"
390. "real knowledge comes through 'complex ideas,' which people may create through a variety of mechnaistic operations....whereas the mind is passive in the reception of simple ideas, it is active in the making of complex ideas from simple ones." and language "is not a source of knowledge, a shaper of thinking, or a part of the very definition of human being. it is 'the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society" that god gave to humans, so that they could be sociable creatures (essay, III.i.1)"; "for language is ancillary to ideas, and when it intervenes in the flow of ideas, it causes amusement at best and chaos, strife, and confusion at worst"; "words do not point directly to things, or to the world, but to ideas in the minds of individual speakers and hearers."
391. "locke thus posits two parallel systems: ideas, which are the source of knowledge and yet are neither social nor linguistic, and words. words are subordinate to, and parasitical upon, ideas. the meaning of words comes, for locke, not from their interrelationships in a total system of signs (as for saussure), nor from their reference to objects in the world (as for augustine), but from their connection to ideas in people's minds....'meanings are in people.'" [this popular slogan & its concept] "could be called semiotic individualism." "in most seventeenth-century english, communication mainly referred to physical processes of transmission and metaphysical processes of consubstantiation: tangibles such as robes, fortunes, plants, commodities, as well as intangibles such as light, heat, blessings, praise, secrets, vices, thoughts, and ideas"
392. unrealistic much? locke's conception came with "a striking requirement indeed: people, in speaking, must match ideas 'exactly' or else their talk risks being mere noise and confusion....it is striking how locke expects communication to work given his commitment to the individual as the source of meaning" (& by "striking" here i think he means something more like "absurd"): "locke thus protects each individual from the tyranny of language: if another's words threaten to break through the hedge surrounding my mind, i can simply realign the 'ideas' to which those words are linked"
393. "if each individual is the legislator of signs, what is to keep society from becoming an anarchy of monads, with each person shut up in the solitude of his or her own ideas and experiences? or conversely, what is to protect individuals from being violated when the communication of ideas works too well?"; "scientific practice offered a model for the intersubjective merging of perceptions seemingly divorced from language and discourse. everybody could look through a telescope, say, and have the same 'idea' (percept)"; "locke's age saw science not only as the study of nature, but as a means to undo babel's curse"
394. i.e. science showed us God, characterized by nature's "order" and "beauty"; rhetoric, on the other hand, like metaphor, "may be employed when it is clear that amusement is the aim, but when 'we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick...[is] for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment' (essay, III.ix.9)"; "locke understood communication not as a kind of speak, rhetoric, or discourse, but as an alternative to them"; both his "politics and his psychology...intertwine. both defend the individual as an owner of private property, whether it be the private property of consciousness ('ideas') or real property ('life, liberty, and estate')."
396. "if individuals do not control meaning, we fear, then tyranny is hovering nearby. heidegger's dictum that we do not speak language, language speaks us, for instance, is often misunderstood to mean that human beings are the involuntary zombies of language"; "the freedom of individuals may consist in their ability to compose new sentences, never before heard, that speak to their condition. it need not consist in the solipsistic reassembly of words and ideas. because we speak in the midst of language, act in the webs of history, society, and nature, and think in dialogue with the living and dead, does not mean that we cannot speak, act, or think creatively"
397. "it is incoherent to see the origins of public, intersubjective meaning in something that is not public (even though locke and his myriad disciples have taught us to do so)"; "communication sometimes masquerades as the great solution to human ills, and yet most of the problems that arise in human relationships do not come from a failure to match signs and meanings. in most cases, situation and syntax make the sense of words perfectly clear: the basis of conflict is not a failure of communication but a difference of commitment. we generally understand each other's words quite well: we just don't agree"; "to describe the social life of language as communication empowers the individual as lord of the signifier but makes any conception of public meaning both unintelligible and dangerous"; "we almost always find ourselves reenacting a philosophical and political drama first written by john locke."

Posted by ttobryan at 07:14 PM | Comments (0)

johnson in the author-cape (collaborative writing 45.2/50)

Woodmansee, Martha. "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 15-28.

1 sentence summary: the authors of old didn't always think of their position & the work that distinguished it in ways our modern conceptions of authorship would lead us to expect; while we think of samuel johnson as an uncontested "author," his textual practices were often and in varied ways collaborative rather than solitary.

passages:
15. "will the author in the modern sense prove to have been only a brief episode in the history of writing? by 'author' we mean an individual who is the sole creator of unique 'works' the originality of which warrants their protection under laws of intellectual property....the author in this modern sense is a relatively recent invention, [one that] does not closely reflect contemporary writing practices. indeed, on inspection, it is not clear that this notion ever coincided closely with the practice of writing."
17. "for st. bonaventura, writing in the thirteenth century, there were four ways of making a book, and none of them involved the kind of solitary origination which edward young sought to promote:

a man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a 'scribe' (scriptor). another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a 'compiler' (compilator). another writes both others' work and his own, but with others' work in principle place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a 'commentator (commentator)....another writes both his own work and others' but with his own work in principle place adding others' for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an 'author' (auctor).

but it is hardly necessary to go back to the middle ages to find so corporate a view of writing, for it was still shared by samuel johnson (1709-1784)."
23. "it is the chief object of modern textual scholarship to identify in all of this writing those words that originated uniquely with johnson so that they can be properly credited to him, and a definitive oeuvre can be established. i do not with to suggest that there is anything wrong with such activities, only that they presume a proprietary authorial impulse which johnson apparently did not himself feel."
24-5. "one comes away from [ede's and lunsford's] investigation of how people actually write in business, government, industry, the sciences and social sciences with the impression that there is but one last bastion of solitary origination: the arts and humanities." and so corrolarily "we are not preparing students for the real writing tasks that await them."
26-7. hypertexts & commonplace books: "the compiler of the renaissance commonplace book composed, transcribed, commented on, and reworked the writings of others--all in apparent indifference to the identity of their originators and without regard for ownership. this quintessentially renaissance form of reading and writing is rapidly being revived by our electronic technology"

Posted by ttobryan at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2006

sideshow freaks (authorship 25/25)

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

1 sentence summary: our disciplinary practices--since & in many ways because of the very founding of our discipline--enable if not require us to continually position students and their writing as carnival exhibits--as "others" who are of low status but worthy of curious scrutiny (and needing both intervention and perpetuation).

6. our baggage: "composition helps define 'levels' of writing, authorship, and status that are necessary for vernacular literary study to maintain its traditional place in the center of mass education. it also…supports a comprehensive social desire to maintain the cultural ideal of 'social place.' but as a carnivalesque site within consequential discourse hierarchies, composition additionally embodies a contrary impulse, giving both its faculties and its students what bakhtin called 'temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order'"…."in addition, composition instruction offers the culture at large an emblem for the repugnant 'body' of writing by individuals. it is an institutionalized way of discriminating between those who will or will not occupy a space for contributing to (and for changing) powerful discourse traditions"
13. (amy tagged this: ) "if we are to contemplate more than personal or local causes for the stunning regularity in descriptions of prejudice against student writing and those who implement instruction in it, or of incidents that appear to pit 'composition' against 'literature,' we must go beyond, or before, examples to identify and explain patterns that reproduce them"
54-5. "as foucault often pointed out," the "kind of enclosed unity" the english courses of the american college represented as composition was developing "requires 'outsiders who make insiders insiders.' like the carnival, composition's moment of origination involved allowing it to act as a relay, a metaphoric switch that diffuses the 'center' throughout lower, metaphorically and actually rural orders"…."as the symbolic national domain of 'literature' was suddenly produced over and against the actual public realm, a newly identifiable, low, and now alien 'writing'" emerged; "nonliterary writing by the unentitled acquired…implications and connotations of murkiness and mythic danger. in composition, literary authorship could be openly compared to the inadequacies of popular writing and especially to inadequate student authorship. like early american popular writing, institutionalized writing-as-composition could be implicitly demeaned as unequal to writing from the advanced elect"
57. "whatever clinical distance a written text might place between a teacher and the student's person was compressed by transferring images of recitation onto the situation of written examinations. in the continuing view that a student's written language reveals personal flaws as readily as his speech, the quality of the student can be identified with the correct or incorrect quality of that student's texts. the embarrassments that students were meant to feel after corrections of their (appropriately) 'mechanical work' placed them well within the range of shame that idiosyncratic speech, or the body, can evoke. writing, in fact, exposes errors and infelicities that speech might elide. thus a pedagogic obsession with mechanical correctness also participated in a broadly conceived nineteenth-century project of cleanliness….undertaken in all good as well as bad faith to convince the masses of their dirtiness while saving them from it. it used the figure of separation between human and animal in an impulse to promote scrubbed surfaces….it raised the issue of contamination from the pointedly unwashed masses, while also…placing them in the dangerous site of the physically messy carnival"
59. as the "theme" developed, "observations from personal experience and narratives about them replaced any purchase on participating in public discourse the student might once have had. consequently, both the written status of mechanically marked compositions and the content of those compositions were now reduced to objects of inconsequentiality."
61. the development & promulgation of assignments in generic "modes rather than actual purposes for writing results in convincing both students and teachers that their already demeaned 'practical' instruction further has no actual practical purpose, except by rather oblique metaphoric extensions that suggest (as rhetorical education never had) that writing can be undertaken and executed well without a specific goal in mind."
68. lit leaking in & taking over served to "increasingly identify introductory writing courses with the result of reading 'important' literature, leaving individual purposes for composing to more advanced courses"
98. the composition course, as it has traditionally been practiced, "divorces writing from any claim on a value system and instead contains it in 'valuing' or 'processing' of language that is even purer than the literary subject's perspective on specific literary objects. in its emphasis, for instance, on 'meaning,' without reference to meaning to, the course extends…the new critical desire to give priority to meanings that are entirely within written language"; "literary subjectivity, and now the subjectivity inevitably created by allowing composing processes to become purposes for writing, focus on the author/writer, not on the results of authorship or of writing"
100. "the subjectivity of composition now created by its model programs appears to result for its students in an infantile and solipsistic relation to the results of writing
198-9. ideally, "with….commitments to articulating many relations between discourse and power and to undertaking close analyses of the social implications of current and past writing pedagogies….students of writing might be imagined as actual people in actual writing situations. such writers do not write without reference to the appropriateness of that action in a specific circumstance. they conceive of resistant written language as the actual form of their desires, not as a set of determinate 'meanings' that they can singularly shape. given responsibility to account for the place their writing will take among others in specific situations—its particularities and the responses it is designed to elicit—students could become aware of the window on full participation in discourse communities their writing represents"; in reality, concerning the roles we allow for, "students are rarely asked to become either the 'writing teachers' that successful writers actually must be for themselves or the teachers of reading they must be for others."

Posted by ttobryan at 02:01 PM | Comments (3)

January 14, 2006

how form/content made writing (authorship 24.1/25)

Woodmansee, Martha. "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48.

1 sentence summary: that modern notions of copyright & textual ownership emerged around eighteenth century is becoming a field commonplace, but little discussion has heretofore centered around why; specifically one theoretical move--fichte's--at the end of a cumulative sequence makes all the difference.

passages:
426. "the 'author' in its modern sense is a relatively recent invention...the product of the rise in the eighteenth century of a new group of individuald: writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writings to the new and rapidly expanding reading public"; previously "in the renaissance and [its] heritage in the first half of the eighteenth century the 'author' was an unstable marriage of two distinct concepts": "the craftsman" and
427. "something hither"--"inspired--by some muse, or even god"; "in neither of these conceptions is the writer regarded as distinctly and personally responsible for his creation" but is "always a vehicle or instrument: regarded as a craftsman, he is a skilled manipulator of predefined strategies for achieving goals dictated by his audience; understood as inspired, he is equally the subject of independent forces, for the inspired moments of his work...are not any more the writer's sole doing than are its more routine aspects, but are instead attributable to a higher, external agency"; eighteenth-century theorists departed from this compounded model of writing in two significant ways. they minimized the element of craftsmanship...and they internalized the source of...inspiration" so that it now came "from within the writer himself": "original genius"
429. thus "from a (mere) vehicle of preordained truths...the writer becomes an author"; wordsworth's observation about the burden of responsibility this inheres: "ever Author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is enjoyed"; it's a catch, see: "the great writer who produces something original is doomed to be misunderstood"; to be great, the Poet "has to call forth and to communicate power" (<--wordsworth), "that is, empower his readers to understand his new work"
430. young: "[the author's] works will stand distinguished; his the sole property of them; which property alone can confer the noble title of an author; that is, of one who...thinks and composes"
431. lessing as the starving artist writing to his brother: "take my brotherly advice and give up your plan to live by the pen....it's the only way to avoid starving"
432. schiller's writerly positionality: "the public is now everything to me"
433. why they were starving & dependent on the public (18th-cent Germany): "with the rise of the middle classes, demand for reading material increased steadily, enticing writers to try to earn a livelihood from the sale of their writings to a buying public. but most were doomed to be disappointed, for the requisite legal, economic, and political arrangements and institutions were not yet in place to support the large number of writers who came forward"
434-8. writers got honoraria; publishers got privileges (sometimes), but nobody really got paid.
439. and thus enter the book pirates! (stage left)
440. where theory comes back in: "the problem of how these two levels of discourse--the legal-economic and the esthetic--interact is one that historians of criticism have barely explored. this is unfortunate because it is precisely in the interplay of the two levels that critical concepts and principles as fundamental as that of authorship achieved their modern form"
442. like robin hood, "the weight of opinion was for a long time with the book pirates[!] for the reading public as a whole considered itself well served by a practice which not only made inexpensive reprints available but could also be plausibly credited with holding down the price of books in general through the competition it created."
443-4. "a variety of defenses was offered for book piracy[!] but the most pertinent to the genesis of the modern concept of authorship are those which sought to rationalize the practice philosophically": ex. "the book is not an ideal object....it is a fabrication made of paper upon which thought symbols are printed"; <--"to ground the author's claim to ownership of his work, then, it would first be necessary to show that this work transcends its physical foundation"; & another ex. (christian sigmund krause) "once expressed, it is impossible for it to remain the author's property.... it is precisely for the purpose of using the ideas that most people by books"--who can then "do with it whatever [they] will. but the one thing [they] should be prohibited from doing is copying or reprinting it?....would it not be just as ludicrous for a professor to demand that his students refrain from using some new proposition he had taught them?....just let someone try taking back the ideas he has originated once they have been communicated so that they are, as before, nowhere to be found. all the money in the world could not make that possible"
444-5. fichte's magic trick: (1) "distinguishing between the physical and ideal aspects of a book--that is, between the printed paper and content" & (2) then further "divides the ideal" into "the material aspect, the content of the book, the ideas it presents; and...the form of these ideas"; thus pragmatically in addition to its physical form "the material aspect, the content of the book, the thoughts it presents also pass to the buyer," but "the form in which these ideas are presented, however, remains the property of the author eternally." & shazam! "fichte solves the philosophical puzzles to which the defenders of piracy had recurred, and establishes the grounds upon which the writer could lay claim to ownership of his work--could lay claim, that is, to authorship."
447. more philosophy: herder's "herb" & "animal" metaphors about taking in nutrients & making them organically into the flesh of the being; "goethe's description of writing as 'the reproduction of the world around me by means of the internal world which takes hold of, combines, creates anew, kneads everything and puts it down again in its own form, manner'";

any poem, even a long poem--a life's (and soul's) work--is a tremendous betrayer of its creator, often where the latter was least conscious of betraying himself. --Johann Gottfried von Herder

& then implications: this new idea of "the book as an imprint or record of the intellection of a unique individual--hence a 'tremendous betrayer' of that individual--entails new reading strategies. in neoclassical doctrine the pleasure of reading had derived from the reader's recognition of himself in a poet's representations (a pleasure guaranteed by the essential similarity of all men). thus pope's charge to the poet to present 'something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,/ that gives back the image of our mind.' with herder, the pleasure of reading lies instead in the exploration of an Other, in penetrating to the deepest reaches of the foreign, because absolutely unique consciousness of which the work is a verbalized embodiment"

Posted by ttobryan at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

diagnosis: postmodern condition (collaborative writing 45.1/50)

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. "Beyond 'The Subject': Individuality in the Discursive Condition." New Literary History 31.3 (Summer 2000).

1 sentence summary: all hope for the "liberal values associated with individuality" is not lost; multiplicity doesn't eclipse uniqueness, because multiplicities exist in unique patterns, er, "anthemions."

passages
405. thanks to the overzealous revealing of the wizards behind all of the curtains, in "the postmodern condition" we're stuck with scary questions: "once the existence of the irreducible 'individual' is contested, what becomes of identity, autonomy, agency, moral freedom, and collective responsibility?" her answer: "a new kind of subjectivity which might refigure our sense of liberty"
406. to do this, the "first step is methodological"--we need to pay attention to literature, where the answer's been unfolding all along. "languages are out tools of thought, the essential precursors of practice. if, as saussure said a century ago, languages are above all systems, then literary texts are the most highly achieved specifications of those systems." ex: "henry james, the first author writing in english actually to situate subjectivity at the perilous margins where syntax fails"
407. chunks of his text show that character & plot don't cohere except in what the readers reconstruct; "the point is the way language operates, through uneasy referents and displaced concretia"; "whatever of importance is 'there' lies in the in-between"; & "keeping readers on that boundary...keeps alive the threat that inspires creative, liberating performances and that asserts the indisoluble bond between subjectivity and language"
408. "reconceiving subjectivity in the discursive condition involves important reconciderations of what language is and how it operates" & "the renunciation of any dualistic representations" such as it "must be either symbolic or semiotic"--"the potential for both/and is rendered tenuous by the dualistic formulation [of] such either/or[s]"; "the formulation suggests that language is a sealed system, a prison house, a sort of Truman Show of Discourse," which "obscure[s] the potentiality of language as a site of liberation from the restrictions that modernity imposed upon subjectivity": "in the discursive condition, subjectivity must be kinetic, not static; it must be multiplied, not single." "it is not necessary to conclude that we have left individuality behind," for 2 reasons: (1) "the cultural conditions of modernity remain broadly functional"--
409. --"very much part of the political and cultural practice of eurocentric societies" & (2) "because it remains applicable to more kinetic postmodern forms of subjectivity." "this emphasis upon a discursive condition has taught us to search for 'code' rather than for 'structure': a shift with substantial implications, not least for subjectivity....language as a system of differential relationships, and not a collaction of pointers."
410. "inhabiting a language means inhabiting a reality, and that so-called 'reality'...changes with the language"; "to reformulate 'the subject' as an element of such differential systems, that is, as a function of discourse, means to accept the multiplicity of what used to be called 'the subject'"; "saussure provided the clue to a new construction of subjectivity when he pointed the way toward langauge as a model of a new kind of system--a differential, not a referential one"; "this difference between the potential and the practice renders a linguistic system forever incomplete-able"
411. "the arena of subjectivity and freedom lies in this gap between the potential capacities of a differential code and any particular specification of it. this 'tender interval'" (to nick from nabokov) "between language (langue) and enunciation (parole) brings to subjectivity a set of conditions entirely different"; "the structure is always potential, never explicit" & "the explicit statement can push the limits of systemic potential without ever exhausting it." "as václav havel suggests...identity is kinetic; it is a process, an event, a particular expression of systemic value"; "identity in his terms definitely has nothing to do with reducing difference, as is the habit of identity-producing political regimes whether they are the 'retrograde' chauvinist regimes based on 'blood,' or the marxist and capitalist systems 'hypnotized' by economic indicators. rather, identity appears only in the act of specifying sets of rules. and as we operate simultaneously in several sets at once, identity appears as the series of constantly multiplied specifications of the potential provided by those rule regimens"; "we no longer have only a subject-in-process, or even a subjectivity-in-process, but something more like subjectivity-in-processes"--"'palimpsestuousness'" (--michael alexander)
412. "the unique and unrepeatable poetry of an individual life cannot at all be compassed by sociological generalizations, which confuse its crucial singularity and flatten its palimpsestuousness..... identity consists in the unique and unrepeatable sequence of a complex enunciation," & "this idea of a distributed subjectivity..allows for the actual complexity of conscious life more fully and precisely than the modern 'subject' ever did.... it seems particularly pointless, even wrong, to impose that monadic idea of 'the subject' upon a personal knowledge that is more random and radical than that traditional model allows"; "this postmodern subjectivity is the moving nexus or intersection at which a unique and unrepeatable sequence is constantly being specified from the potentials available in the discursive condition. such a subjectivity is individual in its sequence, not in its irreducible core. its uniqueness lies in its trajectory"; & "the volitility of language--its resonance, its power of poetic, associative linkage--provides precisely the varied opportunities for selective specification that constitute the unique and unrepeatable poetry of a life" (& all of this has consequences--for 1, it "radically alters our relationship to the past")
413. "given the discursive condition, we have the power to revise our acts of attention" & so history, since story is just what we choose to pay attention to--"there is no longer any possibility of realizing the neutral time of modernity" ("neutrality in time and space were possibly the most original and powerful creations of modernity; they were the necessary conditions of empiricism in science and philosophy, and of representation in politics and in art"
414. "any individual sequence of subjective specifications is palimpsestuous, involving not one but a plurality of possible specifications"; "the 'time' of history is really not possible to the extent that history is a collective event, an expression of faith in common grammars, especially a common time. discursive time is only as long as a given sequence, and those sequences are always finite. old style historical conventions of explanation, especially their causalities and their emergent forms, have little validity when they are restricted to this or that unique and unrepeatable life"
415. nabokov's "anthemion" & thus ermath's "anthematic recognition"--in his description the (made-up) term "indicates an interlaced, flower-like design where themes or patterns arrive and depart from various posting places, recurring and recrossing without exact repetition, and yet providing a kind of rhythmic iteration and patterning. between the iterations of a thematic sequence, as between the beats of a particular rhythm, lie tender intervals within which opportunity lies and the sum of which constitute memory."
418. "conscious life is reborn every three seconds, perhaps not much different from, but perhaps not quite the same as, before....this inflected sequence of anthematic recognition indicates the way experience retains value without lapsing into explanation. this is what replaces 'the subject' and its history."
419. "at the exact level of the moment we are well beyond the determinations of historical 'pluralism' and its singular subjects and projects, and well ahead in the reclamation of a discursive subjectivity"

Posted by ttobryan at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2006

big brother's remediation (authorship 23.2/25)

Marsh, Bill. "Turnitin.com and the Scriptural Enterprise of Plagiarism Detection." Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 427-438.

1 sentence summary: "the ways Turnitin.com maps identity, codes writing, and manages transgression in the service of broader, historically entrenched values of authorial propriety and educational achievement" (par 1) continues to construct student writers as anti-authors and their work as always potentially if not actually digressive.

passages
par 1. "Turnitin.com—as both a writing assessment tool and a kind of authoring environment itself—reifies identity categories via apparent metaphors disguised as informative educational content. Advertised as remedial pedagogy, the Turnitin.com service socializes student writers toward traditional normality and docility notions."
par 2. plagiarism definitions "draw[] on the Latin plagium (‘net to entangle game’)"; "given that plagiarism inherently threatens or undermines a masculinist authorial paradigm, the discourse of plagiarism (i.e., rules, regulations, proscriptions, and policies) often includes sub-narratives or catechisms centering on textual deviance that posit authorship as straight, masculine, and originary, and plagiarism as deviant, feminine, and destructive."
par 4. "whether matches turn up or not, the document sent back to the client is hardly an exact duplicate at all but rather a text repurposed to fit the originality report interface. In effect, all papers submitted for screening are reframed or 'remediated,' to use Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's (1999, p. 45) term, to highlight the possible web-based origins of submitted texts"; "[N. Katherine] Hayles suggested that '[t]o change the material artifact'—by building literary documents on a screen rather than a page, for example—'is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably changes the meanings of the words as well' (p. 23)."
par 5. "The originality report, I would argue, is a remediated “material artifact” which, in recoding a submitted paper (a text document) to reflect the presence or absence of borrowed materials, transforms “the context and circumstances” within which student writing is read and assessed"
par 11. "these recent sample reports [using example-papers about serial killers & identity mix-ups] can be read as a field of [what Barthes calls] 'referential symbolism' (p. 52) where seemingly nonessential allusions to murder and mistaken identity evoke an essential and essentializing equation of plagiarism with (masculine) brutality and (feminine) deception"
par. 13 "As referential symbols, at least, these documents inherently brand plagiarists, to adapt Howard's language, as pathological, deceitful, diseased, and/or violent."
par 14. "how does plagiarism detection as an industrial/infrastructural solution to plagiarism deploy, extend, or challenge the identity constructs inherent to plagiarism? One immediate and simple answer is that plagiarism detection solutions—which build on the assumption that plagiarism by definition represents a false or mistaken authorship—inherently cast plagiarists as significantly different from other categorically true writers."
par 15. "The originality reports are in and of themselves symbolic markers of this difference," creating, as they do, "remediated material artifact[s]" which, as term-coiners Bolter & Grusin would expect, are also "remedial in the strict, pedagogical sense as well."
par 16. "plagiarism, like authorship more broadly, makes sense only when charted against a broader set of 'signifying forms' (Coombe, 1998, p. 29) pertaining to literary, legal, and pedagogical institutions"; "the product name—originality report—clearly capitalizes on the well-entrenched Romantic notion that real authors produce original works of art essentially free of undocumented source"; thus "if the unoriginal or illegitimately copied student paper inherently means a kind of unhealthy or diseased alterity, then clearly the originality report—as both figure and signifying form—functions as a kind of remedial or therapeutic device designed to index and recode in relation to standards of health and normalcy."
par 18. "Color-coded, indexed, and, where appropriate, rife with hyperlinks, the report bears the likeness and functionality of a web page and thus mirrors the process and formal mode by which plagiarized texts are often assembled"; "As hypertextual construction, the originality report faces off against its exteriorized other—the submitted text—and assumes power over its surfaces. The act of public exposure lies here, as well as in the subtle inversion of traditional author positions by which Turnitin.com assumes ownership of the resulting text product and then sells it back (as an exact duplicate) to the client."
par 25. "Turnitin.com—as self-proclaimed teaching resource and, for more students each day, a required component in the writing process—produces and distributes “an ethical technology of subjectivity that creates in students a healthy respect for the authority of the academy” (Crowley, 1998, p. 217)"; "In submitting their papers, writers submit to the color-coded reconstruction of their texts and, more profoundly, their identities as writers, insofar as the originality report frames every submission in terms of its program-driven assessment of similarity. In brief, all writers who participate in Turnitin.com's screening process provide, willingly or not, material support for the corporate detour known as plagiarism detection. In that sense, student writing functions as input or raw material for post-industrial corporate production. This production is an authoring: what comes in is something received, what comes out is a product"
par 31. "The interesting irony remains that if the service were actually to work in pre-empting or preventing plagiarism at large, there would eventually be no need for Turnitin.com or its competitors"; "Turnitin.com writes itself legible as a normative teaching and learning tool, even while its chief operation is to encode scriptural abnormality"

Posted by ttobryan at 06:41 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2006

mr. wizard, how do authors do it? (authorship 23.1/25)

Barthes, Roland. "Authors and Writers." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill, 1982. 185-93.

1 sentence summary: "authors and writers" occupy different social positions and serve different social functions traditionally & theoretically in french society, although in contemporary times these positions frequently conflate.

passages
185. "for a very long time--probably for the entire classical capitalist period...the uncontested owners of the language--and they alone--were authors; if we excepted preachers and jurists...no one else spoke, and this 'monopoly' of the langauge produced, paradoxically, a rigid order....it was not the literary profession which was structured...but the very substance of this literary discourse, subjected to rules of use, genre, and composition, more or less immutable"
186. "when, in france, did the author cease being the only one to speak? doubtless at the time of the revolution, when there first appear men who appropriate the authors' language for political ends"; the authors maintained their positions as cultural creators, but were joined by another group he calls "a new custodian of the public language...the writers." most simply, "the author performs a function, the writer an activity"; the author is absorbed in "laboring" over his "utterances"
187. thus the author "is a man who radically absorbs the worlds why in a how to write"--"why the world? what is the meaning of things?"
188. ultimately, "by identifying himself with language, the author loses all claim to truth, for language is precisely that structure whose very goal...once it is no longer rigorously transitive, is to neutralize the true and the false. but what he obviously gains is the power to disturb the world"
189. the constituative power of the public nature of the authorial function is such that "every author is eventually digested by the literary institution...unless he ceases to identify his being with that of language: this is why so few authors renounce writing, for that is literally to kill themselves, to die to the being they have chosen"; "the writer, on the other hand, is a 'transitive' man, he posits a goal...of which language is merely a means; for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one. thus language is restored to the nature of an instrument of communication, a vehicle of 'thought.' even if the writer pays some attention to style, this concern is never ontological. the writer performs no essential tecnical action upon language....for what defines a writer is the fact that his project of communication is naïve: he does not admit that his message is reflexive"
190. "he [the writer] considers that his work resolves an ambiguity...whereas for the author, it is just the other way around: he knows that his language...inaugurates an ambiguity"; "the author participates in the priest's role, the writer in the clerk's; the author's language is an intransitive act...the writer's an activity. the paradox is that society consumes a transitive language with many more reservations than an intransitive one: the writer's status...is much more problematic than the author's. this is primarily the consequence of a material circumstance: the author's language is a merchandise offered through traditional channels...the writer's language, on the contrary, can be produced and consumed only in the shadow of institutions which have...an entirely different function than to focus on language....then, too, the writer's language is dependent...because it is (or considers itself) no more than a simple vehicle, its nature as merchandise is transferred to the project of which it is the instrument: we are presumed to sell 'thought' exclusive of any art"
191. "the writer's function is to say at once and on every occasion what he thinks, and this function suffices, he thinks, to justify him" whereas "the social function of literary language (that of the author) is precisely to transform thought (or consciousness, or protest) into merchandise." in actuality, this "contradiction...is rarely pure: everyone today moves more or less openly between the two postulations"
192. "today, each member of the intellegentsia harbours both roles in himself": "in short, our age produces a bastard type, the author-writer" who oscillates between occupying these positions, to varying degrees of success, freedom, & clout.

Posted by ttobryan at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

over time (authorship 22.3/25)

Hesse, Carla. "Intellectual Property, 700 B.C. - A.D. 2000." Daedalus (Spring 2002): 26-45.

1 sentence summary: look, a timeline! (charting comparatively the development of notions of intellectual property in various global locales & noting both their influence on one another & potential ramifications of their current direction esp. in the dominant west)

bullet-points:
26. "ancient greeks did not think of knowledge as something that could be owned or sold. a scribe could be paid feed for his labor, an author awarded prizes for his achievement, but the gift of the gods was freely given"; "socrates held the sophists in contempt for charging fees for their learning"
27. "a tour of the other great civilizations of the premodern world--chinese, islamic, jewish, and christian--reveals a striking absence of any notion of human ownership of ideas or their expressions"--"in china in the fifth century b.c. the philosopher confucius is recorded as saying 'i transmit rather than create'"; "throughout the islamic lands, too, there was no concept of intellectual property for many hundreds of years"; "the word 'koran' itself means 'recitation,' and oral transmission of the living word was always to be preferred over a written transcription. the book was merely an instrument, a lowly tool, to facilitate faithful memorization of the word"
28. "a certain notion of legal 'authorship' did emerge from islamic scribal practices. but a concept of intellectual property did not. sharī'a law against 'imposture' or 'fraud' was used to prevent the unauthorized appropriation of the reputation or authority of a great teacher through false attribution of written texts. but the teacher did not own the ideas expressed within his books"; quoth medieval theologians: "knowledge is a gift from god, consequently it cannot be sold"; "selling something that belonged to god constituted the sin of simony"; "even as books were increasingly bought and sold after the advent of print in europe in the fifteenth century, and even as writers began to sell their manuscripts to printers for a profit, there remained a dimension of the book, its spiritual legacy, that lay beyond the grasp of market relations"; "the renaissance elevated the poet, the inventor, and the artist to unprecedented social heights, but their 'genius' was still understood to be divinely inpsired rather than a mere product of their mental skills or worldly labors"
29. "this theologically informed moral revulsion to the idea of an individual profit motive in the creation and transmission of ideas continued to circulate in the united states well into the nineteenth century"; "the early modern period witnessed the emergence of elaborate systems of prepublication censorship, state-licensed monopolies to control the burgeoning printing and publishing trades, and the use of royal letters of patent or 'privileges' to give exclusive monopolies for the printing and publication of authorized texts"; actually, "the first known ordinance regulating publication was that of the emperor wen-tsing, in 835, forbidding the private publication of almanacs."
30. by contrast, "the earliest european initiative occurred in the republic of venice in 1469." & "in 1559, as part of her attempt to resolve the religious controversies that wracked the realm, elizabeth i issued an injunction against publication of any text unless it had been licensed by censors appointed by the crown. the stationers' company kept a registry of licensed books and the crown could, in principle, extend or revoke a license at will....these licenses were 'copied' into the registry book of the guild and soon came to be treated by members of the guild as exclusive rights to print a particular 'copy.'"
31. "a similar process of consolidation of great publishing empires, founded upon monopolistic claims rooted in royal privileges, occurred througout christian europe"
32-3. in the eighteenth century, "rather than selling a manuscript to a publisher, authors increasingly sought simply to sell the 'rights' to a single edition. with greater frequency, secular authors began to claim that they were the creators of their own works rather than the mere transmitters of god's eternal truths. as they came to view themselves as the originators of their work, they also began to claim that their creations were their own property, as susceptible to legal protection and as inheritable or saleable as any other form of property. daniel defoe wrote in 1710, 'A Book is the Author's Property, 'tis the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his Brain: if he sells his Property, it then becomes the Right of the Purchaser.'"; "by the middle of the eighteenth century, the traditional system of publication was everywhere in shambles. first in england, and then in france and germany as well, calls for reform of the regulation of the book trade were coming from all parties involved. readers wanted cheaper books. government legislators sought to increase commerce and to encourage a more educated population within their realms. foreign and privincial publishers...clamored against the perpetual monopolies of the london and paris book guilds on the most lucrative books. authors wanted their property rights in their compositions recognized as absolute and perpetual"; "the reform of the publishing industry in europe thus entailed a rethinking of the basis and purpose of knowledge": quoth locke "every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his"; "three generations later, the poet edward young...asserted that the author contributed more than simply his labor to a book--he imprinted its contents with his original personality"; "young's reflections, like those of john locke before him, constituted a dramatic secularization of the theory of knowledge"
34. "the individual personality supplanted god as the divine font of knowledge"; "it was gotthold lessing, the greatest writer of the german enlightenment, who most forcefully developed the notion of the author's unique personality as a source of property rights in ideas. in a 1772 essay, live and let live, lessing proposed a reorganization of the german book trade that attacked the foundations of the old system. he challenged directly the traditional ban on profits received from writing"
35. "a generation later, johann gottleb fichte, a philosopher and disciple of kant, probed the complexities of the problem even more deeply. fichte posed a difficult question: if creations of the mind were indeed 'property,' what exactly was immaterial property? clearly it did not simply consist of a physical manuscript..."
36-7. "the tension within enlightenment epistemology left those policymakers concerned with the book trade on the horns of a philosophical dilemma. did knowledge inhere in the world--or in the mind? to what extent were ideas discovered--and to what extent were they invented?"; "those who sided with locke, young, diderot, fichte, and the subjectivist camp argued that there was a natural right to perpetual property in ideas and that legal recognition of that right was simply the confirmation in statute of a universal natural right. the utilitarian position thus understood the public interest as the highest aim of the law, while natural-rights proponents argued that the sanctity of the individual creator whould be the guiding principle of any legislator. over the course of the eighteenth century, every european country witnessed a series of legal battles over which of these principles would prevail." "parliament finally filled the legal vacuum in 1710, when the so-called statute of anne definitively separated the question of censorship from that of literary property. the statute ruled that authors, and those who had purchased a manuscript from an author, would have an exclusive right to publish the work for fourteen years....in effect, the statute of anne...represented an uneasy compromise between the position of the stationers' company and the advocates of authors' natural rights on one side and the position of the pirate publishers and advocates of the 'public interest' on the other." in 1774 "the donaldson v. becket decision was crucial in two respects": "it established the 'encouragement of learning' as the highest aim of laws regulating books" and "even though copyright was acknowledged to be a natural right rooted in common law...held that copyright in practice hinged on government legislation"
38. "in early america...colonies differed as to which theory formed the basis of their laws"; in "the united states copyright statute of may 31, 1790" "the author or inventor was acknowledged as an individual with special claims upon his own ideas--but the public good dictated that those claims be limited...a similar tension in french legal thinking provoked a parallel set of court battles"; "in 1777, the french crown, confronted with mounting criticism, was forced to revise the system of privileges...[now] granted authors their own category of privileges....these new privileges were to be perpetual and inheritable, like any other form of personal property." then "the revolution changed everything. 'freedom of the press' was declared and literary privileges abrogated....authors were now widely celebrated not as private creators and possessive individuals, but rather as civic heroes, servants of public enlightenment"
39. "hoping to establish the french book trade on a new, secular footing, the abbé sieyès in 1791 proposed passing a 'law on the freedom of the press'...[that] "recognized authors' texts as a form of property, originating with their creators, and susceptible to legal protection; yet at the same time, the sieyès law reflected condorcet's conern for the 'public interest' by limiting exclusive claims upon literary property to the lifetime of the author, plus ten years"; "a number of individual german states did pass laws similar to the revised sieyès law" but "it was not...until 1870 that imerial germany successfully adopted a uniform copyright law similar to those of the french and the english." "it is no coincidence that the english phrase 'intellectual property' should first appear [in the OED] in 1845"... "because the modern laws regulating intellectual property rest on a largely unexamined set of contradictory philosophical assumptions, these laws have been uniquely vulnerable to challenge--not least by the continuing rise of new methods of distributing ideas and information across national boundaries."
40. in 1886 the berne conferences "led to the signing by ten european nations of the first international copyright treaty"; "this progressive shift in the legal spectrum toward the enforcement of natural rights has led to a steady strengthening of private intellectual property right claims over the doctrine of the public interest"; "as...the united states...evolved from being a net importer of intellectual property to a net exporter, its legal doctrines for regulating intellectual property have tended to shift from the objecivist-utilitarian side of the legal balance toward the univeralist-natural-rights side"
42. "american theologians, including the reverend isaac funk, now [1886] denounced the 'national sin of literary piracy' (which had allowed him to make his fortune on his pirated life of jesus) as a violation of the seventh commandment"; "in 1891 an international agreement with england for reciprocal copyright protection was finally signed by congress"
43. "developing nations...find themselves in the position of the united states in the nineteenth century. and the tendency has been for these nations to hold fast to the utilitarian claim that the national public interest should come before recognition of the natural right to property"; "chinese authorities during the cultural revolution promulgated the following popular saying: 'is it necessary for a steel worker to put his name on a steel ingot that he produces in the course of his duty? if not, why should a member of the intelligentsia enjoy the privilege of putting his name on what he produces?"
44. "in islamic jurisprudence...where the koran is silent, governments are permitted to make a new law, as long as it does not explicitly conflict with koranic injunctions. as a consequence, in the twentiety century a body of intellectual property law has emerged in most islamic states, based on western legal codes"; "the law has preserved the state's right to censor all publications as it deems necessary"; "in general, developing nations--including not only china, taiwan, russia, and the middle eastern states, but african and south american nations as well--have employed the utilitarian argument, derived from condorcet, that intellectual property is inherently social in nature and that the state has the right to limit the indvidual claims of its citizens as well as others in the name of the public good."
45. "conversely, the united states and western europe have witnessed a shift in their jurisprudential traditions away from the utilitarian side of the eighteenth-century intellectual property balance and toward an unprecedented strengthening of the doctrine of the universal natural rights of authors and inventors to the exclusive commercial exploitation of their creations and inventions. and since the 1970s the united states and western european nations have been increasingly aggressive in using trade sanctions and international trade agreements to coerce developing nations to recognize precisely this view of intellectual property rights"; "the consequences of this evolution...are troubling for several reasons": (1) "the dominance of the natural-rights view leads to immediate suffering and to the appropriation of local knowledge for international gain." (2) "the loss of a legal balance in the global arena risks giving monopolistic power to exporter nations." (3) "it puts at risk the liberal political balance between individual gain and the public good that was the foundational aim of the intellectual peroperty laws within western democratic polities themselves"

Posted by ttobryan at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

the dominator (authorship 22.2/25)

Horner, Bruce. "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition." College English 59.5 (1997): 505-29.

1 sentence summary we don't do our students justice to try to move them from one position in the Author/student binary to the other; what we need to do is coinvestigate with them the material realities of authorship to help them see to navigate its potential in various positionalities.

passages
505. "one theme recurring in recent work in composition studies is the institutional distinction maintained between Authors and student writers"; "the binary rests on a bankrupt concept of the Author's 'self' as the unitary autonomous origin of writing"; "what appears to be needed are strategies which acknowledge the institutional operation of the Author/student binary while combating its effects"; "most of these….dominant pedagogical strategies compositionists have devised in response to the dilemmas posed by the Author/student writer binary….situate student (and other) writing in relation to the social in ways that do not confront but elide the…binary."
506. 1st warning: "the dominant attempts to silence alternate elements of the social by 'seizing' the definition of what constitutes the social. by inflating the sense of its reach, the dominant descourages resistance: what remains, it claims, is not social but marginal and therefore of no consequence."
507. 2nd warning: "the terms we use to name the location of the non-dominant are those granted by the dominant and so also in its service: currently, such terms as 'individual,' 'personal,' 'private,' 'natural,' 'experiential,' 'emotional,' 'feminine,' 'irrational,' 'psychological.' even the terms 'individual' and 'social' may invoke for many the dominant's conceptualization of these as discrete, uniform, opposed, and inherently ranked, rather than dialectically interrelated and fluid. efforts to recuperate the oppositional potential of areas of human practice identified as 'personal' or 'private' or 'emotional' by the dominant must involve the reconceptualization of these as 'unquestionably social' rather than somehow autonomous and separate from the social."
in williams, the Author operates @ 3 social levels: (1) "Authors operate within a 'political economy of writing'" involving markets & distribution; (2) they "employ socially inherited forms—a language and written conventions and notations"; (3) the only level at which the author isn't defined as "an autonomous individual" operating within a social sphere: "the continuing process by which 'the contents of [the author's] consciousness are socially produced"
508. "a variety of barriers stand in the way of reaching this final level of accepting the social production of individual consciousness": (1) "the monolithic understanding of the social"; (2) it's hard to understand "the 'emergent' arising out of 'practical consciousness' that is part of the process of the social production of consciousness"; (3) "there is resistance to recognizing the social production of consciousness because it undermines the concept of the Author as a quintessentially autonomous (masculine) individual on which english literary study—and academic institutions and capitalist ideology generally—depends"; "this concept of the autonomous Author is linked to the removal of writing from the social material world, redefining it from a socially located activity to an aestheticized, idealized art object"
509. "one motive for this redefinition, clearly, has been 'a simple class emphasis, to separate "higher" things—the objects of interest to free men, the "liberal arts"—from the "ordinary" business…of the "everyday world"'" (williams). what happens is that "by eliding the social production of consciousness, such pedagogies ironically neglect the capacity of students to engage as social agents in not only the reproduction but the transformation of social relations."
510-1. three common pedagogical "approaches"…"containing (social) contradictions": (1) "equating individual sutdent writers' desires with the demands of [the 'real'] world" (i.e. saying that their recognition of how knowing x will benefit them in today's context = they want to learn x); (2) "a…more common set of pedagogies allows for the possibility of difference between official forms and practical consciousness yet sidesteps any confrontation between these. the sidestep" is done by either: "meaning is posited as existing outside a society's language practices" & "the introduction of the effect of social pressures on the writer is delayed" until later points of the curriculum—"the distinction between 'process' and 'product,' used to resolve the contradiction between granting authority while rejecting its material enactment in 'drafts,' appears in course designs that delay attention to matters of formal conventions of writing only to introduce these later as givens to which students must conform" "these courses can seem at best irresponsible, at worst hypocritical"
512-3. "a third way of responding to the Author/student writer binary…[is] a return to expressivism" (w/all the individual authorizing-focus that entails); "paradoxically, if pursued, such strategies can lead to the same 'hypocrisy or despair' as the others, since a failure to acknowledge the social pressures on writers precludes any resistance to them"
514. "if there is a danger is removing the classroom from the social, there are comparable risks in more recent strategies which identify the social with the classroom": "collaborative pedagogies mirror expressivist attempts to create a zone free of power relations within the classroom, but bolster such attempts with a sense of the inherently social construction of knowledge. they aim to counter the academy's traditional relations of hierarchical authority by creating more democratic relations in the classroom…but differ from e xvsfrq431 xvsfrq431xpressivist pedagogies in their resolute insistence on the sociality of writing….writing is likened to conversation, requiring by definition more than one party." "indeed, the 'marriage' of democratic aspirations and 'practicality' seals over a contradiction between imagining the social as a process of struggle and seeing it as a static realm of conflict-free harmony. …the problem is one of transferring the attributes of autonomy and uniformity from the individual 'Author' to the individual community, and specifically the community of the writing classroom."
515. "so while this pedagogy acknowledges…the 'sociality' of authorship, it is a conception of sociality from which heterogeneity, conflict, and struggle have been excised."
516-7. "multicultural" or "contact zone" pedagogies "aim to overcome the silencing of difference effected through the maintenance of 'normal' discourse"…."where these…pedagogies can run into trouble, however, is in failing to recognize the operation of such pressures within individual student consciousness as well as within the classrooms, and in failing to recognize the contact zone itself (or multicultural education) as an historically specific strategic response, a representation of education put forth in competition with dominant representations of education as the site for (re)producing social homogeneity."
518-19. "(1) we need to recognize such [limited as it necessarily is] articulation as socially produced and mediated rather than as 'free' expression, and (2) mere articulation—the achievement of 'contact'—is not sufficient. otherwise 'contact,' like 'difference,' becomes reified as a process in and for itself rather than being understood as a response to, and with consequences in, specific social and historical conditions"; "what threatens attempts to teach writing as the site for mediation of cultural conflict is the residual power of this first view, in which writing is reified into an object. this danger appears currently in two sorts of arguments: that students can gain authority in their writing through learning a set of rhetorical positionings, and that students can resist oppression through experimentation with diverse or alternative discursive forms. both sorts of arguments aim to address the disparity between Authors and student writers and the resulting disparagement of students, the first by teaching students to produce texts that enact conventions for establishing rhetorical authority, the second by having students produce texts that break from those conventions of writing that may restrict their thinking. what links the two, however, is their identification of Authorship with (objectified) texts which students are then expected to produce"; "pedagogies aiming to teach students to achieve 'authority' through adopting strategies found in already authorized texts sidestep the social relations inherent in the authorizing of those texts while attempting to assimilate students to conventional textual representations of authority"
520. "efforts to teach students to establish rhetorical authority risk bracketing the work of the classroom from the social and reinscribing the status quo of the 'author,' naming as the soial a uniform official view of the classroom, unless they are accompanied by students' critique of the conditions of the various practices by which types of 'authorship' are socially produced, as well as those producing its opposite, the 'student writer.'"
522. "dominant notions of what constitutes work and the social can easily blind us (and others) to the kind of cultural work—for better and worse—accomplished in the writing and reading in which we and our students engage. but learning to recognize and intervene actively in that work can be a way to resist the dominant pressures on our practices as readers and writers, pressures symbolized for many in composition precisely by the Author/student writer binary. teachers persuaded to combat the deleterious effects of the Author/student binary by confronting rather than eliding its operation in their work face the question of how to recover the sense of work and the social in writing as always in process while recognizing (and combating) the dominant's efforts in that process to define both in fixed, limited forms."
526. "we can resist the damaging effects of the Author/student binary on the field, not by promoting students' accession to an authorial status we know to be problematic, nor by consigning them and ourselves to the 'low' labor assigned by the dominant to composition, but by joining with our students to investigate writing as social and material practice, confronting and revising those practices that have served to reify the activity of writing into texts and authorship."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)

intertextual terminology (authorship 22.1/25)

Bazerman, Charles. "Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 83-96.

1 sentence summary here is a quick, terminologically rich definition-set for "intertextuality" as a general category with many subordinate elements.

context
83. description: "almost every word and phrase we use we have heard or seen before. our originality and craft as writers come from how we put those words together in new ways to fit our specific situation, needs, and purposes, but we always need to rely on the common stock of language we share with others. if we did not share the language, how would others understand us? often we do not call attention to where specifically we got our words from. often the words we use are so common they seem to come from everywhere. at other times we want to give the impression that we are speaking as individuals from our individuality, concerned only with the immediate moment. sometimes we just don't remember where we heard something. on the other hand, at times we do want to call attention to where we got the words from. the source of the words may have g