Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators

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Who's cheating whom in college writing instruction This book argues that through binary privileging of the real author (the inspired, autonomous genius) over the transgressive writer (the collaborator or the plagiarist), composition pedagogy deprives students of important opportunities to join in scholarly discourse and assume authorial roles. From Plato's paradoxical dependence on and rejection of Homer, to Jerome McGann's dismissal of copyright as the hand of the dead, Standing in the Shadow of Giants surveys changes and conflicts in Western theories of authorship. From this survey emerges an account of how and why plagiarism became important to academic culture; how and why current pedagogical representations of plagiarism contradict contemporary theory of authorship; why the natural, necessary textual strategy of patchwriting is mis-classified as academic dishonesty; and how teachers might craft pedagogy that authorizes student writing instead of criminalizing it.

Author Bio

REBECCA MOORE HOWARD chairs and directs the Writing Program at Syracuse University. She is co-author of Standing in the Shadow of Giants (1999), The Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines (1995), and co-editor of Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum (2000 forthcoming).