Editors' and Reviewers' Responsibilities in Scholarly Authorship

Conference on College Composition and Communication

Session H.24, "Finding Your Voice as a Composition Scholar"

New York, NY, 21 March 2003

http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Papers/CCCC2003.panel.htm

According to most histories, composition studies is a discipline that will celebrate its fortieth birthday in 2003, commemorating the publication of Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer's 1963 book Research in Written Composition. The widespread appearance of doctoral programs in composition is a much more recent phenomenon, and many of these do not offer systematic surveys of scholarly methods. Little wonder, then, that a collective sense of what constitutes responsible scholarship remains fairly vague. Under the heading of "history," composition scholars may advance ideological arguments that ignore dissent. Under the heading of "institutional critique," composition scholars may seize opportunities to complain about their home departments, without offering evidence for their assertions or considering counterevidence to those assertions. Under the heading of "scholarship," composition scholars may advance arguments without consulting the major scholarship previously published on the topic and without fully referencing all the sources they did consult.

This is not to say that other disciplines maintain uniform, universally applied standards—as the cases of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose demonstrate in the field of historical studies (Goodwin; Hebel). Somewhat less well known is the case of Eugene Tobin, an historian who was president of Hamilton College and who had to resign last fall after it was discovered that his convocation speech, which described the books he'd read over the summer, appropriated from Amazon.com readers' reviews (unattributed, of course) for his descriptions of those books (Lewin).

Yet I do want to mark a sense of—not alarm, maybe, but at least concern—for my own discipline. Like English studies and history, ours is a discipline deeply involved in and respectful of texts. Compared to English studies and history, ours is a very young discipline, and I believe that shows in our scholarly practices.

So today I want to talk about originality and erasure. I want to talk about these not in theory of authorship nor in the writing of students, but in our own writing, the writing of composition and rhetoric scholars. I want to talk about the ways in which we tacitly operate on Romantic and modernist notions of authorship, specifically regarding "originality" as a necessary condition of "authorship," and I want to talk about the ways in which this tacit theory, as it informs scholarship in composition and rhetoric, actually impedes the development of our still-new discipline.

I'll evidence this claim with two illustrative anecdotes. As you listen to them, I'm sure they will prompt similar recollections from your own reading and writing in composition and rhetoric.

The first anecdote comes from my early scholarly career in the mid-1980s. I was new to the professoriate, and having had a troubling incident of plagiarism in one of my classes, I consulted the literature of composition and rhetoric and found practically nothing—a few articles on how to prevent or "deal with" plagiarism (see, for example, Brown; Drum; Malloch; Sauer); one on what students' attitudes were (Dant); and little more. So I began reading out of the discipline, consulting mostly copyright history and literary theory (see, for example, Bloom; Hertz; Woodmansee), and pretty soon I found myself developing my own theories of plagiarism and authorship. For someone as logorrheic as I, that inevitably meant my writing about these theories.

Although I was writing in a near-vacuum of composition scholarship on plagiarism and authorship, I did not find an enthusiastic audience for my work. Part of this was undoubtedly the fault of my underdeveloped rhetorical skills. And part of it was explicitly the topic; one journal reviewer who recommended rejecting my article said that the topic of plagiarism was part of the distasteful quotidian work of the composition class, and he did not want to see the pages of the journal sullied by it. But a third reason for the lukewarm reception of my early work on plagiarism has everything to do with our tacit disciplinary theories about authorship being necessarily originary: one reviewer recommended against accepting my work because, he said, my extensive citations suggested that I had nothing original to say.

My second anecdote comes from the work of Peter Elbow. The book that "made" him as a foundational scholar of composition is the 1973 Writing Without Teachers, which had no acknowledgments and no list of Works Cited. Twenty-five years later, however, Elbow brought out a second edition, in which Works Cited and acknowledgements are both provided. Literary scholarship has today produced what Heather Hirschfield calls "a full reconceptualization of the historical meaning, function, and significance of authorship and its related activities" (609). It has identified the "singular, autonomous author as a discursive formation embedded in particular historical conditions and disciplinary needs" (610). By making that identification, literary studies has put pressure on that discursive formation, especially through its attention to collaborative authorship. The very term collaboration now labels not just multiple authorship but all authorship. It would be no surprise, then, that Peter Elbow might, in 1998, want to supply not only a five-page acknowledgements preface to the second edition of Writing Without Teachers but also a two-page list of Works Cited. The intellectual climate—and the culture's way of thinking about authorship—had changed in the elapsed quarter-century, as no doubt had Elbow's own philosophy of authorship.

Elbow provides his own explanation for why he omitted these acknowledgements from the first edition—and why he is now providing them, 25 years later:

Because I didn't make all these acknowledgements in Writing Without Teachers itself, the book looks "younger" than it is—less connected to preceding writers—and perhaps naïve. But in truth, I wasn't much interested then in where things came from—only in where they were going. I wasn't so interested in other people's ideas as sources and scholarship—only in what I could make of them. Now looking back, I am finally more aware and interested in connections to what came before. (xxxii)

In his own account, Elbow's early choice not to cite and his later reconsideration of that practice derive from his own interest—or lack thereof—in "other people's ideas as sources and scholarship." He doesn't say anything about the culture's interest in these things. So I want to insist on an additional explanation: in 1973, Peter Elbow could not cite extensively if he was going to succeed in establishing himself as a transdiscursive author. In the Romantic, modernist theory of authorship that I believe was then and is now a tacit informing theory for the industry of composition and rhetoric publishing, originary authors invent their own ideas from within, not from other authors, so they don't cite much. Instead, they speak in their Own Voices. Those who have already established themselves as originary authors, though, can be generous and acknowledge sources, as the now-canonized Peter Elbow did in his 1998 second edition of Writing Without Teachers.

Which brings me to the core of my remarks today: It's crucial that the industry of composition scholarship—authors, editors, reviewers, and graduate educators—takes the questions of originality and intertextuality seriously, recognizing and contending with the competing tacit and overt models of authorship that obtain in the profession. Some years ago, Linda Hutcheon pointed out that intertextuality is in the reader as much as in the writer. Intertextual theory, she says, is inevitably reader-centered, even when it appears formalist in postulating relationships among texts; for it is only the reader who might activate such relationships (232-4).

As members of a discipline, we need to work explicitly through the ambiguities of professional authorship in composition studies, recognizing that the responsibility for authorship in our field is a responsibility for readers as much as for writers. In the past year, I have encountered several incidents of young scholars whose work—well-theorized, well-thought-out work—either suppresses sources or is ignorant of prior scholarship on the topic. I'm not talking here about small slips; I'm talking about things like an entire book's replicating the argument of an essay from the only previous book on that topic, a previous book that is not even cited. Scholars in our discipline should not be ignorant of the only previous book on the topic on which they are writing, nor should they feel compelled to pretend that the previous book doesn't exist. They should feel comfortable with their predecessors, comfortable as intertextual scholars.

I am urging, therefore, that journal and academic press editors assure that their submissions are read by experts in the specialized topic of the proposed publication. It's good to have scholars of other topics review submissions, to test the ability of the proposed publication to reach a general audience of scholars in the discipline. But it is equally important to have a specialist reviewer of submissions. I have served in this capacity for a number of journal and book submissions on authorship and plagiarism. I feel a little weird, reviewing work that cites mine, and sometimes having to quarrel with its representation of my work. But as counterbalance, I have many times been able to point the authors of these submissions to important sources that might enrich their arguments.

What I am saying should not be reduced to "We composition scholars should acknowledge our sources, and editors and reviewers should make sure we do." Rather, I am saying that if our new publications are isolated from their intertexts, each new scholarly work is its own "original" argument, preventing readers' sense of dialogue and knowledge-building in the field. We work in a time of shrinking opportunities for publication and increasing demands on us for scholarly productivity. If our response to the difficult material conditions of our current scholarly work is to push too far the need to be "original" scholars; to write our publications without sufficient dialogue with previous scholarship on our topic; and review journal submissions and write book reviews so quickly and cursorily that we do not discharge our readers' intertextual obligations, then we stand to lose a great deal: the development of a coherent, meaningful discipline.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Braddock, R., R. Lloyd-Jones, and L. Schoer. Research in Written Composition. Champaign, IL: NCTE, 1963.

Brown, Dorothy S. "The Perils of Plagiarism." College Composition and Communication 26 (May 1975): 206-7.

Dant, Doris R. "Plagiarism in High School: A Survey." English Journal 75.2 (February 1986): 81-84.

Drum, Alice. "Responding to Plagiarism." College Composition and Communication 37 (May 1986): 241-43.

Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. 2^nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. "How I Caused that Story: A Historian Explains Why Someone Else's Writing Wound up in Her Book." Time (4 February 2002). <http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,197614,00.html> 27 January 2002.

Hebel, Sara. "Historian's Latest Book on World War II Has Passages Resembling Another Scholar's Work." Chronicle of Higher Education 7 January 2002. <http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/01/2002010705n.htm>. 8 January 2002.

Hertz, Neil. "Two Extravagant Teachings." Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 59-71.

Hirschfield, Heather. "Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship." PMLA 116.3 (May 2001): 609-622.

Hutcheon, Linda. "Literary Borrowing . . . and Stealing: Plagiarism, Sources, Influences, and Intertexts." English Studies in Canada 12 (1986): 229-39.

Lewin, Tamara. "Hamilton President Resigns over Speech." The New York Times (3 October 2002). http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/03/education/03HAMI.html . 3 October 2002.

Malloch, A.E. "A Dialogue on Plagiarism." College English 38 (1976): 165-74.

Sauer, Roger. "Coping with Copiers." English Journal 72.1 (January 1983): 50-52.

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

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