Paragraph Summaries
Passage A
- Rosenthal’s book addresses the history of plagiarism. But her attempt to differentiate between “plagiarism, imitation, adaptation, repetition, and originality” only leads to the conclusion that “plagiarism” is used by those in power to label work from those they dislike. Rosenthal’s “postmodern” belief is that there is no difference between any of the terms she lists, meaning Rosenthal doesn’t believe plagiarism is bad.
- The author criticizes Rosenthal’s approach, which is to remove moral considerations from the discussion of plagiarism. Rosenthal claims that whether or not plagiarism is dishonest depends on the text’s cultural location and the author’s position.
- The problem with this historical approach is that it reduces moral standards to expressions of power. This is a loss to political history.
Passage B
- In history, the accusation of plagiarism has been used fluidly despite there always being a sense that it was morally wrong.
- Ricks doesn’t like historical approaches to ethical issues. He thinks that looking at an issue over time grants more relativism that can excuse plagiarism’s inherent wrongness. The author of passage B doesn’t agree with Ricks. At the end of this paragraph 2, “there are historical approaches, and there are historical approaches” means that sure, Rosenthal is wrong, but that doesn’t means Ricks is right to claim that present moral attitudes on plagiarism can be applied to the past wholesale.
- The author agrees that Ricks is right to dismiss the ideal that moral standards depend on expressions of power. But the author says: sure, Ricks is right that Rosenthal’s history is bad, but that doesn’t mean all historical approaches are innately bad. Whatever we think is the correct way to handle plagiarism, previous societies will not always have shared our beliefs.
Analysis
Did you notice the little italicized text above the passages? It’s always important to look at this on comparative passages. In this case, the text tells us a great deal about the authors.
- Passage A is adapted from an essay by Christopher Ricks, a historian. In it, he attacks another historian, Laura J. Rosenthal.
- Passage B is by another historian, Paulina Kewes. This essay is from the introduction to a book which featured Ricks’ essay.
So the two essays are very linked. Passage A is Ricks’ dismissal of Rosenthal. Passage B is a critique of Ricks’ argument.
The big picture of what happened is: Rosenthal writes her book, Ricks criticizes Rosenthal, then in passage B Kewes partly agrees with Ricks but mostly criticizes him. We also know Kewes think Rosenthal is wrong (“bad history” in the middle of Paragraph 3 refers to Rosenthal).
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Summaries of Views
With that in mind, let’s sum up each person’s view. I’m writing as them:
Rosenthal: I come to question the differences between plagiarism, imitation, adaptation, repetition and originality. In fact, I argue there is no difference between any of them! As a post modern person I believe everything is relative and nothing is bad. Except power. I hate power. In the context of plagiarism, power calls things it doesn’t like plagiarism, thus showing how power is bad.
Ricks: Rosenthal is annoyingly postmodern. Can you believe it, she really thinks there is no difference between plagiarism and adaptation or anything else. She has no fixed principles, no morals. For her everything is power and politics, and that means getting rid of all morality.
I hate it. Can’t we just agree that plagiarism is bad? It is a loss to history if we lose this moral certainty.
Kewes: Look, Rosenthal is an idiot. I agree with Ricks on that much. I don’t say her name, but in paragraph three I say Ricks is “rightly dismissive” of “post-modern reduction….”. And then I say “bad history”, referring to Rosenthal, the historian. I don’t see how I could state things any more simply, I’m sorry. I’m an academic and have to write indirectly like this.
But….that’s as far as I’ll go in agreeing with Ricks. C’mon, look at my first paragraph. I write a bunch of complicate words to say that of course everyone has always viewed plagiarism as being wrong, but exactly what plagiarism is or why it is wrong has changed over the years and between societies. It’s complicated ok?
So at the end of paragraph 3 I make clear that historical societies don’t necessarily agree with Ricks (or any of us) on what exactly is the right way to stop plagiarism. Attitudes change over time. Though we can have moral certainty that something is wrong with plagiarism, there is no universal moral standard we can claim.
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Hopefully that helps you make sense of the three positions. Without a clear idea of all of the opinions presented it is very hard to interpret these passages.
I would’t say you need to know the details of everything in passage B, it’s pretty abstract. But you do need to know broadly what I wrote above.
In passage B, Kewes’ main point is this: history is complicated and attitudes shifted over time. Kewes thinks Ricks (passage A author) is right to criticize Rosenthal for her belief that plagiarism is fine. But Kewes thinks Ricks oversimplifies. Ricks wants to go back to the past and apply his moral standards and condemn plagiarism as he sees it. However, those in the past may not have shared our specific beliefs about plagiarism, even if they thought it was wrong in their own way. So Kewes is arguing that Ricks too is failing to practice history due to the moral stance he uses to analyze the past. Kewes argues instead we should understand what past attitudes to plagiarism were.
Kewes agrees with Ricks that Rosenthal is wrong, but disagrees with his belief that his view of plagiarism can be applied to the past wholesale. In a way both Rosenthal and Ricks are strangely parallel: both seek to apply their present day views to the past.
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