On plagiarism

The meaning of plagiarism has been narrowed to a quasi-legal charge. “A false accusation of plagiarism,” you will be informed, if you used the word, “is defamatory.” And thus another weapon is removed from criticism’s arsenal.

Perhaps I am the last person in the world who should be complaining. I too have experienced the ambivalent kiss of plagiarism. The first chapter of my doctoral dissertation was plundered by a professor (not on my thesis committee) to whom I had made the mistake of showing it. In it I had treated the Ars Poetica as a “creative writing textbook”—the first scholar ever to do so, as I observed proudly—and the translations from Horace were my own. A couple of years later I received a packet of books for review. Imagine my surprise when I opened one to find an essay, by that same professor to whom I had shown my chapter, on the Ars Poetica as a creative writing textbook. The translations from Horace were my own, word for word, although they were attributed to Walter Jackson Bate.

Now, I happened to have an earlier draft of my professor’s essay; we had traded work-in-progress for comment and criticism, you see; and his draft included not a word about Horace. Believing I had him dead to rights, I wrote to his publisher, who disclaimed all responsibility, saying that I should have objected when the essay first appeared as a magazine article. I wrote to the professor, who replied by saying that he regarded a false accusation of plagiarism as defamatory. My position was precarious; I was a “new hire,” without tenure or status; he was a full professor at a prestigious university. In my cowardice, I let the matter drop.

I have also been obliged to deal with plagiarism in the classroom. The first time was when a former student wrote to me, several years after graduation, to confess a bad conscience: he had plagiarized the final paper in a course on modern literature. He did not seek absolution; he left his punishment to my judgment. After much advice and reflection, I asked him to contribute a series of scholarly publications in Jewish studies to the Evans Library at Texas A&M, whose holdings in the area were pathetically thin. Although some of my advisers derided me for it, this is a decision that I have never regretted.

About a decade later, I received four papers which contained an identical paragraph. In the mean time, the World Wide Web had become available, and a quick search of some of the odder phrases turned up the source—an undergraduate paper at a college in Florida. One of my students had copied the original verbatim; the other three had made more or less “selective” use of it. Again I decided upon leniency; the students were put on academic probation; they were given F’s on the paper and were required to write another in its place; the F’s were included in the final calculation of their grades; none earned higher than a C. And since then, all papers in all my classes must be passed through a plagiarism detector.

And yet these three cases have little or nothing to do with literature. They are examples of “academic misconduct.” They are the foreseeable consequences of a university system, which demands intensive writing from students and frequent publication from professors without any recognition of the difficulties involved or any concern for the sacrifice of quality to quantity. To write even minimally well is time-consuming and requires long bouts of seemingly unproductive concentration, to say nothing of the blank solitude and undisturbed quiet that most students—even some professors—want only to escape.

Plagiarism ought to be returned to literary criticism. I am thinking, for example, of Harold Ogden White’s Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance (1935). Outside academic hearings in which someone’s integrity is being questioned, the distinction between plagiarism and imitation is invaluable. It is the distinction between servility and admiration, between submitting to a writer’s cultural authority and adapting a writer’s ideas and phrases to fresh effect. Even in scholarship the distinction has disappeared; imitation is now called “creative imitation” to scrub it clean. But the disappearance merely testifies to the loss of faith in imitation as an aid to discovery.

Imitation is translation: something distinguished or striking is recast in different words, or left in pretty much its original condition and put to an entirely different use. As when Francine Prose rewrites The Mill on the Floss as Goldengrove. Plagiarism is when this is done badly—not to say something of the writer’s own, but to join a chorus already in progress.