RE: Plagiarism, credit, and culture

[Charlene Hirschi <hirschi@cache.net>]

Yep!  You got through.  There was a message a few days ago saying what to do
if you can't read your own messages.  I can't read mine either, and I need
to find that message and follow the steps.  You'll probably get a dozen of
these, but thought I'd just let you know you're messages are making it to
the list.

At 01:00 PM 2/10/97 -0600, you wrote:
>I'm never sure my messages get through since I don't receive those I write
>(if this one does, could someone e-mail me or something).
>
>Do we need to anticipate credit to do our best?  Our best as scholars?  Our
>best as artists?
>
>Think about literature classes when we talk about allusions and references
>(without the page numbers).  And think about art.  When you have a painting
>by J. H., for example, you don't see a footnote at the bottom giving credit
>to Jackson Pollock for the influence on brushstrokes (a sort of artistic
>paraphrase).  Also think of some of the postmodern pieces that directly take
>images from art (these are controversial in the art community, but also
>defended by many camps). And I'm a poet and develop some of my poems in
>response to art.  I'm paranoid.  If the artist is well known, I don't put a
>credit, but if it's a newer artist I do mention the name somehow after the
>title.  I don't mention writers directly within poems. Wallace Stevens used
>art and expected his audience to know, for example, whose "Blue Guitar" he
>was talking about,  and I would like to think that people get my
>references/allusions to the art I deal with, too, but the teacher in me gets
>nervous about attribution, even if I'm picking up visual images with verbal
>interpretations.)   And one book of poems I did was based on Freud's case
>histories.  I read Freud's notes and "transformed" them into my voice (my
>voice pretending to be the various women and Freud) in poetic form.  At the
>beginning of the book, though, I put the sources  and yet not a single
>footnote or citation throughout for things like technical phrases for
>diseases used by Freud.  Distinguishing between a poem (which in this case
>was a fictional construct based in reality) and a "scholarly work" (a
>nonfiction piece of prose that must follow certain guidelines) made me
>nervous because the scholar in me is obsessive about proper citation systems.  
>
>I teach citation not as only a way to avoid "plagiarism" but a way to show
>how different voices come together to create a piece of writing.  I like to
>characterize research as chains in a link, or as pieces in a quilt, or as
>threads in a weaving, etc. Today in 101, for example, we worked on different
>ways to introduce references to a primary text and showed how we could move
>from analytical insights to illustrations from a primary text to comments to
>references to secondary sources to enhance (and to show how you are creating
>connections from different sources to make it all work).  
>
>This is all to say that this discussion about citations is fascinating and
>philosophically challenging.  
>
>Dr. Felicia Mitchell
>Department of English
>Emory & Henry College
>P.O. Box 947
>Emory, VA 24327-0947
>PHONE: (540) 944-6225
>FAX: (540) 944-6880
>E-MAIL:  fmitchel@ehc.edu
>
>
>
Charlene Hirschi
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

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