Standing in the Shadow of Giants

This book is a history of composition studies which follows a single strand: plagiarism. The problem the book addresses is the contradictions between what composition scholars now collectively believe about reading and writing, and what composition teachers (including many of those same composition scholars) actually put into practice in their classroom representations of authorship and plagiarism. The book concludes with recommendations for how those contradictions might be reduced or at least addressed. The composition history that this book offers is a history of how "patchwriting" (something all academic writers do) came to fall outside the category of mimesis and into the category of cheating. The book's ideological task is to identify the cultural work that this criminalization of patchwriting serves. And its teleology is an effort to restore patchwriting to the category of mimesis. The book asserts that patchwriting has a legitimate and valuable place in literacy instruction and recommends that the category of plagiarism be redefined by educational institutions: that authorial intention become a component in determining what is and is not plagiarism, and that patchwriting qualify as plagiarism and thus as transgression only if the author's intention is fraudulent. Contains an extensive references list. (NKA)