Malvolio Reading Response

My thoughts about Howard’s book are a little helter-skelter at the moment. I’ve been struggling all weekend with how to approach my response, where to focus, what to address. My sense of it is that I’m juggling two primary reactions: on the one hand an awareness that I should be open-minded and willing to entertain radical ideas, however uncomfortable or angry they make me, and on the other hand an instinctive rejection of most of the basic principles on which her theory is based. The problem is that I’ve learned to trust my instincts; I’ve been an artist and an educator long enough to have a sense of when I’m being bamboozled.

And of course I realize that in rejecting pretty much everything Howard has to say I am falling into the cunning little trap she has set for me and other writers and teachers like me. So I may as well get this out of the way now: part of the calculated effect of Howard’s book is to position anyone who disagrees with her as backward, unenlightened, and an enemy to progressive composition theory (she has, elsewhere, called herself a “martyr”—a deeply disturbing characterization—and her opponents “jerks” [see her paper “Public Intellectual, or Public Object? Mass Media Representations of Plagiarism Scholarship” at http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Papers/CCCC2003.caucus.htm]). Walter Jacobson has, not surprisingly, already articulated a response that echoes my own, but let’s see if I can articulate why I think Howard’s attempt to reconsider writing and composition pedagogy within a context informed by the open-source or remix culture of the Internet is both false and dangerous. For while it’s clear that her zeal for radical revision of our understandings of such concepts as mimesis, collaboration, authorship, and plagiarism comes from an honest desire to improve the teaching of composition and promote genuine learning, it’s also clear to me that this right idea has led her very far astray.

Howard seeks to confound utterly our understanding of such common—and commonly understood—concepts as authorship, text, collaboration, and plagiarism. This, she tells us, is born out of a personal teaching experience that led her to question her own definitions of all these concepts, and especially plagiarism. And she found her answers in postmodern literary theory, specifically the works of Foucault and Barthes. The first part of the book is devoted to laying out the various problems in defining plagiarism; here Howard is largely focused on the idea of what she calls patchwriting: “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another” (xvii). The entire book is, in some sense, an explication of her belief that this particular practice is not only common among students but, in fact, the way all writers always compose; thus the very notion of plagiarism requires some radical reconsideration. Her concern with the criminalization of patchwriting particularly is connected to what she describes as a tension between dichotomous pedagogical models she refers to as “gatekeeping” and “facilitating”—the gatekeepers being invested in weeding out those deemed unworthy of admission into the sacred halls of academe, the facilitators being those more interested in helping all students succeed. At the very least Howard is advocating that patchwriting specifically be “decriminalized” so that we begin to recognize the practice as a kind of learning in which students engage and actively collaborate with the texts in question.

It all comes across as very bold and revolutionary, but the problem with this deliberately carnivalesque approach to composition is its very insistence on its own radical nature. Howard is clearly aware that her revisions—indeed, reversals—of previously received concepts of authorship and pedagogical technique are going to be discomfiting on some level to many of us, but she insists that those reversals are legitimate because they reflect the ways writers—both student and professional—actually compose. I would like to suggest instead that the reason they make so many of us so uncomfortable (if not downright angry) is our sense that they seem so radical and opposed to our actual methods of constructing texts because, in fact, they are. She asserts repeatedly that “all writing is collaborative” (41) and that “[patchwriting] is something that all academic writers do” (xviii), but she is unable to marshall any actual evidence to support these assertions. And I’m fairly certain that that’s because there can be no evidence to support such wild claims—short of surveying “all academic writers” or reading “all writing.” She even admits that she has so far failed to convince her own students. And though she places the blame for this failure squarely on the deeply entrenched cultural paradigms against which she so assiduously works, I think it’s far more likely that her students don’t accept it because it just ain’t so.

The major problem that I have with Howard’s book is not her clearly poststructuralist attitude toward authorship or her (to me) deeply troubling notions of plagiarism—she is certainly entitled to her own point of view. No, what most concerns me is that, by insisting that patchwriting is not only our default compositional method but one that should be actively encouraged in students, what she advocates and perpetuates is, more usually, just bad writing (context is of course important; as many here have pointed out, patchwriting can be perfectly appropriate in certain professional circumstances, though I contend that the composition classroom is not necessarily one of them). Even if the average student will instinctively patchwrite when asked to integrate sources into her writing, my sense of it is that it has very little to do with creative engagement with the text and a whole lot to do with simplicity and convenience. The best of my students have no trouble recognizing that patchwriting is at least bad writing, and at most not writing at all. I don’t mean to be cynical, but at the college level, how many of our students who patchwrite do so because it affords them a fast and simple way of getting through what they see as an unpleasant chore? And yes, it is absolutely a failure of pedagogy when our students think of their writing as something unpleasant to be avoided. But I would suggest that instead of enabling bad writing habits we should try to find genuine ways to get them to engage not only with the texts to which they respond (or, if you prefer, with which they collaborate), but also with the texts they produce as independent, autonomous authors. Denying that there is such a thing as authorship strikes me as counterproductive. And insisting that all learning is constructed by the learner only accelerates our already rapid decline into irrelevance.

Internet culture—remix culture, open-source culture, whatever we want to call it—has almost certainly helped foster the perception among some students that patchwriting is an acceptable way of engaging with texts. But it seems specious to me to suggest that because a method is valid in one context it is also valid in others. The concept of collaboration is certainly useful, but Howard’s appropriation of it (as well as her use of the related concept of mimesis) is highly problematic. For any theater artist—to use my own discipline as an example—collaboration implies reciprocity. Directors, actors, designers, playwrights, even audiences, all collaborate in two ways: by working with texts and by working with each other to create works of theatrical art. There is a silent agreement that exists between playwrights and their interpreters: the playwright writes specifically so that other artists can interpret her work. In other words, no matter how dictatorial a particular playwright might be (consider, for instance, George Bernard Shaw or Samuel Beckett), it is understood that the interpreters who will be responsible for performing the text are not the enemy but actual collaborators—Julius Caesar has been staged literally countless times since it first appeared in 1599, and each of those stagings represents a collaboration with the text and with Shakespeare and his collaborators (the performers and printers). Similarly, every published edition—publication being a kind of performance—is also a collaboration between an editor and the text. The idea of collaboration is thus written into the text. It is a fundamental aspect of the very act of playwrighting, of creating dramatic texts that are meant to be performed and interpreted by other artists.

But Howard isn’t speaking of theatrical collaboration. Nor, unlike Aristotle, is she speaking of theatrical mimesis. She is in effect applying concepts that were born in the theater (and, in the case of collaboration, other arts) to the composition classroom—an irony, it may be argued, since she seems to me to be in the process of denying some of the very qualities that make writing a fine art as well as a craft.

At this point I feel the need to return to a question I seem to remember articulating earlier in the semester: what is it that so offends (some of) us about the idea of what Howard continually refers to as the “autonomous author”? She continually insists that such a concept—the concept against which Barthes and Foucault also labor—does not reflect the actual ways all writers actually write. Yet the autonomous author has been with us since Homer, and most of us who write have no problem with the concept until someone like Foucault—or Howard—suggests that it is problematic. My opinions of the so-called “theories” of Foucault and Barthes are well-recorded so I won’t rehearse them here. It is enough to say that any theory of authorship or composition that relies on either of them has serious credibility issues for someone like me.