“We need to reorganize our schools to free the great teachers from tests and reports and busywork, and to expel the lousy teachers…Don’t blame the teachers. Blame the corporate system that is still training compliant workers who test well.”

Seth Godin in Linchpin (via hesychast)

The Plagiarist’s Tale

Q. R. Markham (real name Quentin Rowan), the author of Assassin of Secrets, talks to Lizzie Widdicombe from The New Yorker about his compulsion to plagiarise. The article is fascinating: it covers the idea that plagiarism was an addiction for Rowan. (Widdicombe notes plagiarism actually doesn’t meet the psychological definition of addiction; it is classified as a compulsion). Rowan talks of how his early success as a young writer led to his anxiousness to be excellent and to please people. Unable to put in the work required to develop his craft, he began his life as a serial plagiarist while he was still in high school. The article also touches on the fact that the publishing industry assumes that agents and publishers will know enough about writing to pick up on acts of plagiarism before they sign authors. Widdicombe points out that plagiarism is not a crime. Acts of plagiarism can be found to be in breach of copyright laws, but plagiarism itself is judged as an ethical transgression. I also loved this section that talks about the distinction between emulating stylistic conventions of other authors and genres and plagiarism.

Originality is a relative concept in literature. As writers from T. S. Eliot to Harold Bloom have pointed out, ideas are doomed to be rehashed. This wasn’t always regarded as a problem. Roman writers subscribed to the idea of imitatio: they viewed their role as emulating and reworking earlier masterpieces. It wasn’t until the Romantic era, which introduced the notion of the author as solitary genius, that originality came to be viewed as the paramount literary virtue. Plagiarism was and remains a murky offense, “best understood not as a sharply defined operation, like beheading, but as a whole range of activities, more like cooking,” the English professor James R. Kincaid wrote in this magazine in 1997. Imagine a scale on one end of which are authors who poach plot ideas (Shakespeare stealing from Plutarch) and on the other are those who copy passages word for word: Jacob Epstein, who cribbed parts of his novel “Wild Oats” from Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers”; the Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, whose novel plagiarized chick lit.

I found this article to be equally intriguing as well as frustrating. Plagiarism interests me for three reasons: first, having had to deal with students plagiarising when I used to teach at university, I felt perturbed that policies in dealing with plagiarism are not uniform. Secondly, after I left academia and entered the public sphere I had to learn to deal with the devastation that there is little protection of my work. Writing reports that are not released publicly makes it difficult to argue against outside experts who appropriate my ideas. Thirdly, I see many problems that go along with blogging with respect to plagiarism. Writers have to actively try to catch people who steal or reproduce their work without attribution. The main option currently available to bloggers is to ‘name and shame’ blogs that plagiarise; but other than that there is little recourse.

Read more about the whole Markham/Rowan debacle here.

Image credit: Photograph by Molly Landreth via The New Yorker.

One of my favourite moments on The Simpsons:

Skinner: Oh, come on, Edna - we both know these children have no future!

…Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.

Sociologists Stephen Scanlan and Seth Feinberg argue that studying cartoons can help sociology students apply ‘their sociological imagination to the observation of everyday life’. Though they use The Simpsons as a case study, their observations have relevance to the broader study of animation as a ‘pedagogical practice’ (the theories, methods and principles of teaching and learning). Scanlan and Feinberg argue that the study of ‘humour and satire can be effective techniques for challenging students to think critically…’ (p. 137). They conducted a survey of sociology students about whether studying the humour on The Simpsons complemented or distracted their learning of broader sociological constructs. The results were positive. Two typical student comments were:

By showing you that concepts we discuss are everywhere in society - even places we wouldn’t think about, like cartoons - The Simpsons helps you think critically about course material.

It makes us look and question a TV show that most of us just watch and don’t think anything about (p. 136).


Scanlan and Feinberg argue that because watching animated series is part of students’ everyday social experience, studying cartoons can help to illustrate sociological themes, thus making critical discussion more accessible. Consequently, Scanlan and Feinberg conclude that animation demonstrates the utility of sociology in ‘the real world’:

The true indication of teaching is measured by students’ ability to grasp course material effectively, and then use that knowledge beyond the classroom. The Simpsons provides a wonderful way to accomplish this goal (p. 138)

Given that cartoons are part of popular culture, the study of animation might be easily dismissed as a frivolous activity. Scanlan and Seth’s research supports the idea for my Sociology of the Mundane series - cartoons represent a useful teaching tool that might help to make scientific concepts relatable to students. As I’ve previously argued in my previous posts on the sociology of animation, cartoons also reproduce cultural and spiritual discourses; they reflect historical and political biases of different societies at particular points in time; and they can also be used to resist mainstream ideologies.

Reference:
Stephen Scanlan and Seth Feinberg (2000) ‘The Cartoon Society: Using The Simpsons to Teach and Learn Sociology’, Teaching Sociology Vol. 28: 127-139.