Death of the author

Reading Howard's postmodern deconstruction of plagiarism was an interesting experience. I'm not sure I've ever heard plagiarism, that scourge of high school English classrooms, discussed in anything but negative terms. The debate about plagiarism rages on: the high school where I teach is currently in the middle of a district-wide initiative to educate about and reduce instance of plagiarism, and the district spends a good deal of money for a subscription to turnitin.com, an anti-plagiarism suite of software.

A line that caught my attention was on page 24, where Howard asserts that the "values" that are threatened in modernist views of plagiarism "surely include individuality." She states that modern society cherishes the concept of a the "true author." This strikes me as true: ours has long been a culture that has elevated the sanctity of the individual.

But maybe this is starting to change. Howard's book was published in 1999, prior to "Web 2.0." Her talk of students purchasing term papers seems almost quaint in this era of the internet's free-for-all of recycled essays, file-sharing sites, and, of course, Wikipedia (another scourge of high school classrooms). I wonder if, amidst all this unfettered access to information, the concepts of true authorship and the attendant values of individuality and autonomy are starting to wane. Writing, at least outside of the classroom, is becoming increasingly more collaborative, as we saw in Jenkins's chapter "Why Heater Can Write." In a Times article about digital literacy, Motoko Rich describes how on-line fan fiction, wildly popular, in particular among teenage girls, differs from modernist views of true authorship. Rich writes about Nadia, an enthusiastic on-line author:

Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be. So like in the book somebody could die but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”

Clearly, in this paradigm, writing and reading are collaborative efforts and authorship a shared phenomenon. The individual writer doesn't matter so much as the shared text. If Nadia tweaks the ending to a story, rescuing one character while dooming another, does the story become hers? Is she a "true author," or is she plagiarizing the work of the first writer to post the story? And if the whole story is based on Harry Potter or Twilight or a manga series, who is the author in the first place?

It's confusing and resistant to easy classification and definition, which seems to be a major point Howard is trying to make. But one thing seems clear to me: increasingly, the students entering our classrooms are going to have a different understanding of authorship, autonomy, and individualism than we as teachers do.