CCC 61:2 / december 2009
Arabella Lyon
“You Fail”: Plagiarism, the Ownership of Writing,
andTransnational Conflicts
Responding to cultural concerns about the ownership of writing and the nature of plagiarism, this article examines discourses about plagiarism by ESL students and argues
for a plurality of approaches to understanding the ownership of language and textual
appropriation. First, it uses speech act theory to explain the dynamics of plagiarism;
second, it examines transnational political contexts for writing pedagogy; and third, it
offers a Daoist understanding of language.
A
n anecdote: February 2005 I went to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. At an
outlying temple, standing in the heat and humidity of the rainforest, I bought
a travel book. I was aware that it cost less than the same book in Singapore, but
at that sweaty moment, I was concerned with buying something from each of
a dozen adolescents hawking souvenirs. After all, Cambodia’s per capita gross
domestic product is US$453 (2006); the U.S. per capita GDP is US$42,000.1 Only
later did I realize the book was a cheap knockoff, a black market item, a violation of intellectual property rights. The next day I knowingly bought university
press knockoffs about Cambodia from the pushcart of a landmine amputee; by
then I knew no one owned Cambodia’s history more than its citizens. If anyone
should profit from the country’s art and bloodshed, it should be its citizens.
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The ownership of a life-story or a national history scripts complex relationships involving indwelling, performance, and regeneration, relationships more
complex than economic and legal precedent and allocation.
Western legal concepts of copyright seem logical in the context of the
university, but as so many have noted, the ownership of writing is not transparent.2 In fact, the possessiveness of the Western author is an anomaly, the
product of a particular history that requires disciplinary apparatus from law
courts to classrooms to maintain its status. After all, language functions not
as a private enterprise, but rather as a shared human attribute, forming our
identities and marking our memberships through conflicts, escapes, tensions,
claims to power, and demonstrations of control. The negotiated and relational
aspects of language may be why the ownership of writing creates such irresolvable tensions.
The month after I was in Cambodia, Douglas Hesse delivered the chair’s
address “Who Owns Writing?” to the Conference on College Composition
and Communication. Concerned with property rights, teaching conditions,
pedagogical content and authority, and responsibility for assessment, Hesse
suggested that “those who teach writing must affirm that we, in fact, own it”
(459; emphasis in original). He responded to the U.S. commissions and forces
who would take writing away from writing teachers, refusing to recognize their
expertise. Still, inherent in his argument is a belief that writing can be owned,
that it is some sort of commodity to be controlled, and that the ownership is in
one place, a space for teachers. Similarly concerned with how forces outside of
teachers and writers control academic writing in the United States, Bill Marsh,
in Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education, examines the disciplinary powers of U.S. higher education in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, looking at the ways in which faculty, administrators, journalists,
policymakers, and software entrepreneurs regulate plagiarism and student
writing through a range of technologies and techniques. Ownership in the age
of Internet, desktop publishing, and corporate capitalism is an increasingly
contested space. Conflicts over ownership grow and will continue to grow as
the ownership of words—given our theories of discourse, ideology, historical
contingencies, and identity formation—is more complicated than any laws,
especially laws founded on a modernist, if not romantic, view of the author and
teacher. Still, writing owned by a national history, authors, or teachers seems
preferable to the growing claims, if not control, by software entrepreneurs and
international corporations.
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In “An Essay on the Work of Composition: Compositing English against
the Order of Fast Capitalism,” Min-Zhan Lu does not discuss the ownership of
writing, but she examines the English language in light of the “lived reality”
of “people stratified by labels such as Native-Speaking, Educated, Developed
Countries, or Democracy and their Others” and the ways in which composition
is used to “police how peoples the world over use English” (20). Describing the
forces that would control English and its market values, desiring long-term
change in “existing structure and order of competing languages, englishes,
and discourses” (42), Lu argues that “English is enlivened—enlightened—by
the work of users intent on using it to limn the actual, imagined, and possible
lives of all its speakers, readers, and writers, the work of users intent on using
English to describe and, thus, control those circumstances of their life designed
by all systems and relations of injustice to submerge them” (44). Inherent in
her view is an equalitarian sense of language use; speakers should use English
to describe their experiences and not be controlled by those benefiting from
transnational capitalism, those claiming ownership of the standards of English.
Lu’s acknowledgment of the porous borders of English, its diaspora, and the
dissonance across language demands, in turn, an acknowledgment of the porous, diasporic, and dissented ownerships of English. Ownership claims grow.
My purpose in this article is to question who owns writing in a world of
international education, what global forces enter into discussions of international student writing, and how might we discuss cultural differences around
ownership more productively. In this brief excursion, I am not asking who owns
writing about Cambodia or who controls writing in a classroom or a country—
for the ownership of writing is always partial. Rather, using the discourse of
plagiarism to control the breadth of my inquiry, I wish to examine how culture
forces and assumptions about the nature of speaking and writing complexly
interact in an international classroom. To do this, I examine the claims made
for differences between Chinese and Western views of rhetoric and writing
and how those claims are then used to homogenize Chinese experience and
to characterize Chinese students as deficient and in need of remediation. In
response to ongoing failures to recognize difference productively and to acknowledge different forms of ownership, I offer two theoretical insights, and I
argue that comparative rhetorics require an interrogation of the standpoints
of both sets of cultural assumptions (Hum and Lyon).
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Chinese Rhetoric, Stereotype, and Plagiarism
Chinese rhetoric is too often too simply described as repetitive and formalist.
Early in discussions of Chinese rhetoric and composition, in 1966, Robert B.
Kaplan claimed that Chinese students’ texts are indirect, a characteristic that
“marks much of Oriental writing” (6); in 1971, Robert T. Oliver claimed that
“originality was discounted” (262). Even in 1985, in “Contrastive Rhetoric: An
American Writing Teacher in China,” Carolyn Matalene described Chinese
students as “repeating set phrases and maxims, following patterns, and imitating texts” (804). While Matalene sought to understand “the relativity of our
own rhetoric” (806), her essay focused on the students’ difficulty in separating
plagiarism from imitation and their concern with style and form over truth.
Her argument for a different weighting of memory and invention in China is
not invalid, but it leads to facile stereotypes and the dismissal of complexity.
For example, one of her commentators recalled “outrageous dishonesty” when
Hong Kong students memorized the answer key to the English competency
tests (Thomas 845).
In response to the early characterizations of Chinese rhetoric as imitative, lacking in invention, and even dishonest, there have been a series of
correctives. While, for the most part, the responses draw parallels between
Chinese and Western rhetorical patterns and then argue for more universal
understandings of rhetoric, scholars are increasingly differentiating Chinese
rhetoric from Western while avoiding characterizing Chinese as deficit in
basic rhetorical values.3 For instance, Yameng Liu responds specifically to
Matalene’s claims of insight into Chinese rhetoric, based on a small sample of
student writing. He argues against essentializing Chinese rhetoric, a polyglot
with several millennia of history, formed in dynasties ruled by ethnic groups
as different as the Hans, Mongolians, and Manchus. He demonstrates that the
act of generalizing either Western or Eastern rhetoric is deeply problematic.
In discussing Matalene, LuMing Mao contrasts the description of rhetorical
differences between cultures and the attribution of the differences to a lack
on the part of one, a “deficiency model.” He finds Matalene’s characterization
of rhetorical “difference to a Chinese lack of individualism” as continuing the
tradition of holding up the Western discourse as the positive, whole model
and seeing other models as deficient, a bias based in Orientalism (407–09).
Continuing to correct simple theories based on the classroom experiences
of Western teachers, Xiaoye You describes the intersections of Western and
Chinese rhetorical traditions in the evolution of English writing instruction in
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Chinese colleges from 1644 through the early decades of the twentieth century.
While modern writing instruction in China began in 1901, clearly colonialist
and global influences existed long before.
Since the 1980s, thinking has progressed from the early Orientalist approaches. Scholars in rhetoric and composition have been educated by the
writings of Mary Garrett, Yameng Liu, Xing Lu, Lu Ming Mao, and Hui Wu,
or maybe we have simply become more sophisticated in constructing differences within composition. Still the stereotype of the Chinese student unable
to produce his or her own words and ideas remains, even in the most sensitive
of work. If rhetoricians are less likely to make blanket claims for rhetorical
traditions, case studies of Chinese students remain problematic. While David
Alan Sapp’s description of teaching in China is particularly insensitive in its
generalizations of student plagiarism, even careful case studies of plagiarism
are troubling. For instance, in her recent article, Kathryn Valentine follows
the path of Rebecca Moore Howard and Lise Buranen, who also have analyzed
plagiarism as a literacy practice, not an ethical failing, and she makes a serious
argument for plagiarism as “part of a practice that involves the participants’
values, attitudes, and feelings as well as their social relationships to each other
and to the institutions in which they work” (89–90).4 Building on Howard’s article “The Ethics of Plagiarism,” Valentine describes plagiarism’s link to ethics
and the acquisition of a discourse. She rightly claims, “Given that plagiarism
involves social relationships, attitudes and values as much as it involves texts
and the rules of citation, I think that we can better recognize the work that our
students present to us if we also recognize that this work involves negotiating
social relationships, attitudes, and values” (90). Therein, she links plagiarism
to identity negotiation. She claims that an ethics discourse regulates and
constricts the student’s identity while defining what constitutes work, hence
the social role of “honest student” requires that one does not plagiarize. The
text, and not the intention of the writer, is used to judge the honesty and so
the identity of the students.5 Using Judith Butler’s sense of identity, “the ‘doer’
is variably constructed in and through the deed” (181), Valentine argues that
we read the student off of textual features and, in interpreting the subject on
the page, we regulate his or her identity through our interpretations. To evince
these claims, she studies the case of a doctoral student in engineering who
failed to use appropriate citation and is charged with plagiarism.
The graduate student is Chinese, an “outsider” who needed to both translate and acquire a new discourse, one who used few of his own words in writing
a literature survey and failed to use quotation marks. He had worked hard on
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“reading” and “arranging” the material, but “he did not think he needed to show
. . . his opinion of this particular problem in the field”; rather, he thought the
assignment’s purpose, the work of the assignment, was “to show the professor
his familiarity with these sources” (Valentine 99). Valentine, clearly concerned
with the student’s place in the university, helped him negotiate the charges
and their meaning. Believing himself to be honest, he was unable to realize
that his literature survey was not in keeping with academic honesty and that
it presented an opportunity for him to be recognized as dishonest.
In the end, the administration recognized that the student’s intent was
not to deceive, and though he failed the course, he only received a warning on
his permanent record. Valentine’s narration tells us that initially the professor
would not allow him to rewrite as she would have to allow two other Chinese
students to rewrite, both also accused of plagiarism (but who, as far as I can
glean, were judged fully guilty of dishonest intent). The student himself writes
that he was shocked by the charge as were “All Chinese students” (102). One
wonders here if that “all” includes the two of guilty intent. Valentine’s point
is that a failed textual performance, a conflict over what is the work of the
writing assignment, resulted in a conflicted relationship between student and
professor. I, however, cannot help but see the commonplaces of a professor
who imagines China as radically Other, the saved Chinese student, and the two
corrupt Chinese students. In these commonplaces, I read Valentine’s analysis
unintentionally in keeping with Matalene’s response to Liu’s critique: “Many of
us from the West who have lived and taught in China realized—viscerally—that
our encounters were being governed by cultural, linguistic, and, yes, rhetorical
norms so different from our own that we were driven to search for whatever
explanations we could find” (“East and West” 163). Valentine’s case study seeks
to historicize and locate agency, but in presenting the case, she invites extension and homogeneity. Case studies lead to a naturalization of a single insight
that comes to have cross-cultural validity. Why is it so hard to describe these
rhetorical norms? What are those extreme differences we cannot explain, but
only “viscerally” intuit? What redeems one Chinese student but not the two
who plagiarized and failed?
The research on plagiarism across cultures is robust in TESOL studies,
and its social science methodologies might help to nuance some of the cultural
differences with which writing researchers have struggled.6 In the twenty-firstcentury classroom, differences might better be discussed not as the difference
between Confucius and Aristotle, but as the difference between students raised
to write in different nation states with differing national histories.7 As I will
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show, however, even this shift to contemporary context over historical context
is inadequate. In “Cultural Values, Plagiarism, and Fairness: When Plagiarism
Gets in the Way of Learning,” British researchers Niall Hayes and Lucas D. Introna examine practices of and views on plagiarism, focusing on four clusters of
postgraduate management students at a United Kingdom university, students
representing the U.K., China, pan-Asia (not China), and Greece. Hayes and
Introna find that, outside of the U.K., students have little experience with writing other than business reports or group projects; Chinese and Greek students
write as little as one essay on average, which obviously does not prepare them
for writing longer, more interpretive research. Hayes and Introna argue that
this coupled with speaking English as a second language, a history of exams
as memory tests, and, especially among the Greek students, a belief in the fundamental unfairness of the educational system all contribute to significantly
different cultural attitudes about plagiarizing.8 Hayes and Introna suggest that
faculty in transnational settings need to help students more with transition
from a pedagogy of textbook-based teaching and recall assessments to one of
critique, interpretation, and ownership of one’s language.
Hayes and Introna, in fact, do document statistically significant different
attitudes about copying texts, but the meaning of the differences is puzzling.
Their claims for British students’ literacy and values are not supported by the
data. Hayes and Introna discuss the nature of Others’ schooling prior to arriving in a British university and its influence on attitudes toward plagiarism, but
they don’t adequately address the degree to which British students accept collaborating on a text or copying a text without citation. Yes, more Greek, Asian,
and Chinese students were likely to receive help on work (50%, 25%, and 40%,
respectively) and judge outside help as not cheating or trivially cheating (50%,
75%, and 50%) than British students (221). What are more interesting, however,
are the percentages of the British students, who are held as the norm of ethical
citation after years of instruction: 31% of them have received substantial help
and 38% judge it as not cheating or trivial cheating. While British collaborators are in the minority of their group, they represent a significant part of the
student body. Furthermore, while 40% of Chinese students admitted to copying
a paragraph or more, a percent double that of Asians, Greeks, and British students, still 20% of Asians, 21% of Greeks, and 19% of British students admitted
the same. Students were not quick to judge copying as wrong; 40% of Asians,
30% of Chinese, and 25% of British students judged such lengthy copying as
“not cheating or trivial cheating” (219). The British students were as likely to
copy paragraphs as the Asian or Greeks; one wonders about the limited effects
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of teaching citation, the limited impact of more intensive writing instruction,
and the significance of national identity contrasted with student identity. Of
further interest is that the Greeks, described as alienated from the educational system, copied as much as most other groups, but were harsher in their
judgment of act: only 7% of them accepted it as not cheating or trivial. They
copied with guilt. These numbers reveal just how difficult it is to understand
the relationship between culture, educational experience, and plagiarism, and
it suggests why student review boards may be helpful in ascertaining student
perceptions and intentions in plagiarizing. By themselves, cultural explanations—in the humanities and social sciences—seem to offer limited insights
as to how students view textual ownership. On close investigation, dualities
and divisions are fuzzy, their logics unclear, and generalizations problematic.
Speech Act Approaches to Plagiarism
While I do not offer speech act theory as the definitive insight into the ownership of words, I believe it provides a vocabulary for understanding the multiplicity of ownership and, at least briefly, escaping the legal and ethical claims
of dishonesty, alienation, and failed ownership that surround plagiarism. I do
not argue for the truth of any theory, but rather for its use value in explaining
events and activities. Even though it is an Anglo-American methodology, it can
help to disclose why some teachers and students, in the West and East, are so
differently vested in the ownership of writing and the control of plagiarism.
Speech act theory—as demonstrated in the writings of Jurgen Habermas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Searle, Judith Butler, J. L. Austin, and Kenneth Burke—is
concerned with how language has effect in the world, not truth or falseness
(constative nature), not attachment to reality, but with what effects arise from
the action of words. Speech act theory is not neutral, but it shifts the focus
from the identity and role of the student to the effect of language. Its theories
vary on what authorizes a speech act and what is the source of its effects; still,
their concern with action and effect—not laws and economies—moves the
discussions of ownership onto relationship and performance.
For purposes of this investigation, I look at J. L. Austin and Kenneth Burke.
Both Austin and Burke emphasize the performative aspect of language, seeing
words as formative deeds that both conform to a script and create or form an
event. Performance is form and forming: cultural structure (form) and subjective
agency (forming). Each scholar has a somewhat different theory of what authorizes a speech act and what its effects are. Burke argues this point in his review
of Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (“Words”), and while he goes too far
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in differentiating between himself and Austin, going to the point of trivializing
Austin, I will work with his sense of the difference because it helps us see the
views of language inherent in different views of plagiarism. Even so, remember
as I follow Burke’s dichotomy that Austin himself observed, “over-simplification
is the occupational disease of the philosopher” (Philosophical 252).
While Austin acknowledges “a great many uses for language” (Philosophical 234), he is most concerned with describing statements that “do” something:
“I do,” “I apologize,” “I christen thee. . .” These performative utterances or speech
acts tend to be institutionally authorized, conventional, and scripted. For
example, the judge—supported by precedent, the great institutions of law, his
robes, court officials, etc.—says, as so many earlier judges have said, “I sentence
you to death.” With that conventional and scripted performance, the speech
act causes death not simply through the words of the judge, but through precedent, written law, the will of the society, and the apparatus of the state. The
death sentence, while not one of his examples, is a quintessential Austin speech
act in the conventional sources of its authority and worldly effect. Similar is
the teacher’s pronouncement, “you fail.” Here the institutional regulations on
plagiary, the history of copyright law, the technological apparatus that reveals
plagiarism, the authority vested in a teacher’s credentials, the requirements of
the syllabus, and the place of student all together allow the teacher to discredit
a student’s prior productivity over a single act of copying. The student-teacher
relationship, the actual words written, and the individual’s claim to works are
still less than the forces external to the site of utterance, and yet, amazingly, it
takes all of these forces to control the ownership of writing.
Emphasizing the forming, not conforming, aspects of speech, Burke characterizes speech acts as more constitutive or formative in their effects. He uses
the term motive to signify the complex tension between an agent making or
moving the world and being made by the world. The judge may still issue death
sentences, but in Burke’s approach, the motives of the cultural scene and the
judge become significant in understanding the agency and the act. For Burke,
what is most significant in the speech act is not ritual and convention, but the
ways in which the death sentence forms the world of the court, the surrounding culture, and the lives of the defendant, officials of the court, and prison
guards. His speech act model is dynamic with its focus on motive coupled
with the mechanism of dramatism and its five terms: “what was done (act),
when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency),
and why (purpose)” (Grammar xv). A Burkean speech act is formed in ratios
of the terms. When the teacher writes “F,” how is she created in the act, how
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does the classroom scene change, what is the purpose of failing students for
copying? Burke understands these questions, and others, as interactive and
generating ratios.
If we imagine speech acts on a continuum from the institutional and
formal to dramatistic and forming, we can imagine new ways of discussing
the act of writing and writing instruction. In doing so, one is not necessarily
theorizing writing outside of other cultural traditions. Within classical Chinese
philosophy, there are implicit and explicit theories of the relationship between
speech and act or effect. If one turns to classical Chinese scholars, such as
Confucius or Han Fei, one finds a more malleable sense of how different kinds
of speech can be acts in different ways: institutionally scripted, formative, or
irrelevant to action (after the fact). Certainly the idea that speech is action is
not limited to modernity in the West; thoughtful people throughout history
have seen the effects of speech and formulated beliefs about causal relationships. The emphasis on speech as constitutive and forming, however, appears
most consistently in late modernity and postmodernity.
If speech acts exist on a continuum from formal, ritual, and institutional
to forming, inventive, and individual, then where does plagiarism lie? Does it fail
to achieve status as an act? Do aspects of it, such as Howard’s “patch writing,”
exist as ritual or the learning of form?9 What is the nature of forming in the
formal, disciplined essay? To which theory of speech act do faculty subscribe?
Students? I contend that many students, from China to the United States,
cluster around two beliefs about their essays as speech acts, or one might say
that they cluster around two motives; they have nascent discourse theories of
which teachers of writing should be aware. First, some students do not see the
writing of a paper as a speech act with worldly effect, and so they are unlikely
to be concerned about issues of textual ownership, authority, sources, or even
quality. Plagiarism is trivial; it certainly isn’t a crime, sin, cheat, or deviance as
it hasn’t sufficient worldly effect (despite what the schoolmarms say10). One
might imagine many of Hayes and Introna’s students expressing this view as
an explanation of why it is not cheating to copy a paragraph or more. This is
not to say that the students do not want to succeed, but that they see the act
of writing well as removed from their worldly work and effects. Second, other
students see their papers as conventional and scripted, dependent on authority from certain discourses and sources that may or may not be referenced.
Subscribing to something like Austin’s speech act theory, they see the activity
of writing in school as an institutional, ritualized act, one with effects, but
more through form than through their agency. Like the judge who sentences
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a prisoner to death, their relationship to their speech act is so filtered through
traditions, institutions, and formula that they do not have direct responsibility as individuals. Their agency is muted, and while they desire to produce a
good text, the writing is a formal act, one of reproducing genre, discourse, and
disciplinary structure, not one of identity generation or textual ownership. For
both groups of students, their writing is believed to be distant from the author
as authority and owner and from the speech act as worldly action: hence the
stakes of plagiarism are low in terms of ethics, identity, and responsibility.
When Valentine writes of plagiarism and the difficulty negotiating identity, she is writing of a problem more typical of students who wish to enter the
academy as intellectuals and researchers. The doctoral student who struggles
with the implications of identity and plagiarism is specific to a student—Eastern
or Western, outsider or insider—who wants to perform and have effects within
a discipline, a career, and a world. Like many U.S. teachers of writing, potential
intellectuals and researchers are likely to have a more Burkean perspective on
what constitutes the speech act of the essay, who owns that paper, and what
effects the paper has on others. For such writers, the act of writing constitutes
significant effects in the world (development of the writer, suasion, foundations
of democratic speech, etc.). Writing teachers who share a Burkean perspective
are most concerned with developing the authority of the student’s voice within
the text. While many U.S. teachers would agree with Burke’s claim that “men
are capable of but partial acts, acts that but partially represent themselves
and but partially conform to their scenes” (Grammar 83), they emphasize the
representation of the human act over the conformity to conventions, regulations, and traditions.
A generative theory of speech act may extend to all researchers and
intellectuals; it, however, does not extend to all writing teachers. Many of us
remain concerned with forms and conventions, genre and grammar, modes and
methods. Though such a pedagogy is not privileged in the field of composition,
the purposes of such a pedagogy can be as ethically driven as ones focused on
invention and prewriting. Only an ethnocentric, universalistic ethics would
imply otherwise. As we have seen, cultural models are incomplete, often covering up colonialist assumptions. Still coupled with other approaches, cultural
models help to achieve a thick description of who owns writing; potentially,
they can give us diverse agencies and subjects, a richer means of discussing
Valentine’s redeemed and condemned students and the similarities and differences among the British students and their foreign peers. To understand why
teachers might follow conventional writing assignments, textbook pedago-
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gies, and recall assessments, I want to examine briefly one justification for the
teaching of writing within a con(forming) frame.
Pedagogy in the Authoritarian State
Though not all, some teachers trained in an authoritarian system share the
common student view that writing is conventional, a means of assessing
competence, but in itself without significant worldly effect and without constituting identity. Teachers in an authoritarian state may value honesty and the
hard work of doing one’s own writing; still, the inventive and generative side of
writing is downplayed as a more vexed activity within states that do not support
freedom of speech, public deliberation, and free exchange of ideas. Authoritarian
states rarely brutalize their subjects, but rather rule through a comprehensive
symbolic order, one that excludes other possibilities from being enunciated.
Invention and action are problematic terms for teachers in regimes committed
to cultural containment. Nation states that limit public speaking, regulate the
press, control television and radio stations, censor films and performing arts,
restrict the dialects spoken in the media, and block websites do not foster the
teaching of writing as the creating of public action. While, under authoritarian
rule, teachers and students are not homogeneous, powerless, or docile, their
historical situation is significantly different from those in developed democracies. Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, “resistance clearly accompanies all
forms of domination” (83); within authoritarian regimes, teachers and students
have agency and political potential.11 Governments know, as we know, “writing
often becomes the context through which new political identities are forged”
(78). Within states committed to regulating political identity (and they all
are so committed to varying degrees), writing and the teaching of writing are
subjected to different tensions of ownership, tensions between the political
state and author, educational institutions and the teacher.
I have lived in Singapore and China, and I am sensitive to their significant
cultural and economic accomplishments. Still, in the Reporters without Borders’ “Press Freedom Index 2006” of 168 countries, Singapore ranked 146 and
China ranked 163 (http://www.rsf.org). If writing teachers and students in the
United States must struggle to own writing, certainly teachers and students
struggle more in countries where bloggers are arrested and speech corners
must be applied for weeks in advance. Teachers in authoritarian states, such
as Singapore and China, understand the struggle for ownership of speech in
complex ways. If an authoritarian state is the scene, then the state-authorized
curriculum and classroom is the agency and good workers are the purpose.
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Ethical, responsible teachers in authoritarian systems (agents) often have a
different pedagogy (act) than those in less authoritarian states. The tendency
to teach student to see writing as formal and conventional is not a deficient,
but a logical pedagogy in their location. U. S. teachers may wish to intervene
(Matalene 802–03) and impose their theories of ownership, invention, speech
act; they may express frustration with their students’ internalized restraints
(Fox 56). When teaching abroad, however, teachers should not claim ownership
of a writing pedagogy, but see it as a shared enterprise with their students; in
doing so, they avoid neo-colonialist moves that privilege exogenous values;
create boundaries around the use of English; and privilege their values while
barely understanding local values, the perils of the state apparatus, and the
consequences of ownership. While overseas teachers may nod to the community
values inherent in Sinocentric or other local pedagogies, true understanding
requires risking their own foundations.
In states that do not value freedom of speech (and few do12) theories of
language are still multiple and diverse. If some of the communicative traditions
of China—especially in the context of the authoritarian state—encourage imitation, respect, and form, that is not all there is (X. Lu). While speech act theories
provide possible ways of conceiving writing in the classroom, a Western lens,
however perspicuous, is not the only lens. Daoism is another theory to bring
to a global classroom, another way of explaining culturally different concepts
of ownership. In a comparative piece, Haixia Wang approaches the rhetoric
of Tiananmen Square through the writing of Zhuang Zi (370 to 301 B. C. E.)
and his text Zhuangzi. Dao, referentially elusive, is often defined as “way” or
“path, ” but Wang’s interpretation of Zhuang Zi is more in keeping with David
L. Hall and Roger T. Ames’s vision of Dao as “the incoherent sum of all names
and forms” (245). Like Hall and Ames, she sees Dao not as an object, a what,
or a noun (The Way); nor as an approach to life, but as the multiple acts and
processes that make the world. If Plato offers one best world, Zhuang Zi sees
a world that is boundless, without a standpoint of critique, without a place to
imagine betterment. In Daoism, there is not cosmic unity, only process and
becoming. When the Zhuang Zi recommends we become “one with all things,”
Hall and Ames interpret this as not as dissolution into a united whole, but as
recognition of the continuous and integrated nature of phenomenon within
one’s field of experience. No atoms and no boundaries.
Wang reads Zhuang Zi—who collapses similarity and difference, unity and
diversity—as acknowledging the worth of the acts of “sorting, analyzing, evaluation,” but resisting the fixing of categories (167). Zhuang Zi would rather that
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we understand difference as temporary and temporal and as having dynamic
boundaries. In valuing ziran or “spontaneity,” a concept Wang contrasts with
kairos or “the propriety of timing and measure,” Zhuang Zi places choice and
new challenges above authority and rules (172–73). Unlike Confucian rituals,
hierarchies, and imitation, Daoism offers a different way of understanding
textual integration and lack of boundaries in the writing of Chinese students.
Rather then feigning a homogeneity of Chinese plagiarism, one based in Confucian imitation and limits, or a homogeneity of student plagiarism, one based
in Austin’s conforming, one might acknowledge a concept of language and
ownership that values dynamism and continuity over boundary. Demarcations,
such as quotation marks and footnotes, create categories and hierarchies of
ownership that deny the dynamism of a Daoist world. Dismiss the containment of ownership: the sharing of multiple texts becomes the integration of
language, and textual relationship becomes a spiritual practice. Plagiarism
claims an ownership for language, but language cannot be owned, only shared.
In light of Daoism, I will resist closing discussion, limiting understanding
and fixing the boundaries of difference. Teachers and students may slide along
the speech act continuum of form and forming, or they may cut in and out, ziran
(spontaneity) deciding the tactic of the moment. No single theory of discourse,
no single claim of ownership, and no single act of writing can lay claim to wholeness or finality. Rhetoric and composition studies must consider the limits of
the nation-state and citizen-subject as analytic tools and not ignore more the
global forces shaping literacy (Hesford). In response to transnational capitalism and its rigid claims of ownership, we must develop pedagogies across and
within difference, a project fraught with tensions, competing goals, conflicting
economical and cultural assumptions, and unsettled questions of ownership.
In the end, even Burke and Austin have more dynamism in common than
Burke allows, differences being temporary and temporal, useful for a moment’s
insight. After all, Austin wrote:
It must be remembered that there is no necessity whatsoever that the various
models used in creating our vocabulary, primitive or recent, should all fit together
neatly as parts into one single, total model or scheme of, for instance, the doing
of actions. It is possible, and indeed highly likely, that our assortment of models
will include some, or many, that are overlapping, conflicting, or more generally
simply disparate. (Philosophical 203; emphasis in original)
Austin’s claim for theory is a bit like Zhuang Zi’s refusal of hierarchies and truths.
As higher education becomes increasing transnational, our theories—theories
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of ownership, author, intellectual property, plagiarism, pedagogy, difference,
act, and identity—will become more fluid and tentative.
Notes
1. United Nations statistic: http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/snaama/
resultsCountry.asp?Country=116.
2. See Lise Buranen; Rebecca Moore Howard, Standing; Andrea Lunsford; Alastair
Pennycook; Sue Carter Simmons; Candace Spigelman; and Susan Stewart for critical
histories of copyright and authorship.
3. For careful differentiations of textual borrowing, one might also see the critiques
of John Flowerdew and Yongyan Li; Robert Andre LeFleur; Alastair Pennycook;
Amy E. Robillard; and C. Jan Swearingen.
4. Amy E. Robillard also discusses the relational aspects of plagiarism that, in part,
explain teacher anger over student acts. Plagiarism seemingly calls the teacher’s
identity into question.
5. For more discussion of the role of intention, see also Rebecca Moore Howard
(”Ethics” 80–81) and Arabella Lyon (Intentions).
6. The gap between the writing expectations of the academic community and the
discourses of ESL students is well documented. Ruth Spack offers a good, though
early, literature review. For some more recent discussion see also Vivien K. G. Lim
and Sean K. B. See; Fan Shen; Ling Shi; and Vivian Zamel.
7. Arguments about ancient Chinese rhetorical and literary practices are historically
useful for context, but they tell us little about what current students experience.
For discussions of traditions of discourse see Brigid Ballard and John Clanchy;
Glenn D. Deckert; Andy Kirkpatrick; Xing Lu; Arabella Lyon, “Rhetorical”; Alastair
Pennycook; and Xiaoye You.
8. David Alan Sapp makes an argument that Chinese students are alienated from
their education because they believe the educational and business systems are
unjust.
9. Rebecca Moore Howard (Standing) sees writerly growth in “patchwriting”;
copying others’ words can be a step in developing intertextuality. Howard makes
the key distinction between plagiarism and misuse of sources. She argues that,
while plagiarism is a serious problem, difficulty handling attribution of sources is
symptomatic of poor or developing writing, not academic dishonesty.
10. Do not doubt the gendered issues with plagiarism. See Howard’s “Sexuality,
Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism”on femininity as a characterization
of plagiarism. It could be argued that concerns with East Asian plagiarism are kin
to the Orientalizing that emasculates Asian males.
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11. I think of Min-Zhan Lu’s resistant users of English, refusing English in favor
of Chinglish (21–22, 38), and of my Singaporean students and colleagues resisting
government crackdowns on Singlish and the promotion of standardized English.
12. Owen Fiss and Stanley Fish are quite articulate on the limits of freedom of
speech within the United States.
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