In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Practice of Plagiarism in a Changing Context
  • JoAnn Pavletich (bio)

In order to determine if plagiarism is an accurate term for Pauline Hopkins's textual appropriations, we must examine her rhetorical context, including audience and purpose. In the narrow context of a mainstream audience and mainstream publishing around 1900, the unattributed incorporation of fifteen different texts from a wide array of genres found in Hopkins's third novel, Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902) would inevitably be seen as plagiarism. In my recent essay on Winona, I employ the term as a starting point to understand Hopkins's purpose for constructing at least 25% of that novel with passages written by others.1 Although future discussions will necessarily refocus the lens of audience, purpose, and context, discussing plagiarism from a narrow historical perspective is a logical starting point for understanding the risks Hopkins took with her startling compositional practice and the possibilities those risks generate.2

Winona is presciently described by Elizabeth Ammons as possessing a "multivocality … by no means totally under control" (214). Writing in 1996, Ammons could not have imagined the text's numerically and generically abundant voices in conversation and conflict with each other: in Winona, Hopkins employs speeches, news reports, prison narratives, historical texts, short stories, and novels. She uses some very briefly, others repeatedly and at length. Some of the texts that appear in Winona also appear in her two other serialized novels. The plagiarism in Winona is not subtle or accidental. It functions as a weapon, a distinctive method of political resistance that utilizes literature as a strategy. By appropriating and giving new meaning to other authors' words, this strategy explodes racist assumptions about character, gender, and race as it expands [End Page e9] Hopkins's repertoire of strategies for representing black female agency. Specifically, Hopkins manipulates four of Winona's most important source texts to imbue her heroine with sexual agency and moral authority, qualities made possible largely by the specific texts and passages she appropriates. Thus, this risky compositional practice appears inextricable from Hopkins's generally politicized themes, characters, and intentions.

Geoffrey Sanborn's 2015 essay detailing similarly extensive appropriations in Hopkins's final novel, Of One Blood, Or the Hidden Self (1903) also uses the term plagiarism. Sanborn identifies 72 passages from 28 different sources that are "more or less transcribed, without attribution, from other texts" ("The Wind of Words" 68). However, he does not engage the plagiarism through Hopkins's well-known political concerns, focusing instead on an interpretation of the voice created by the appropriations, arguing that they are "remarkably nonagonistic" and exemplify her participation in an "unendingly nonsubjective voice" (73, 74). Quoting Barthes' famous declaration, "in the text, only the reader speaks," Sanborn asserts that Hopkins's melding of voices conveys for her "the unowned, unownable flowing of language, the babbling of the inter-textual brook" (74). Context and audience seem unimportant to Sanborn, but central to his argument is the assertion that her purpose is essentially aesthetic. He contends that Hopkins developed a "plagiaristic aesthetic: an insistent, increasingly complex interest in the formal possibilities of the practice" (84n8). The considerable differences between my approach and Sanborn's speaks to the equally considerable number of possible avenues for exploring Hopkins's compositional choices and the role of her textual appropriations within them.

Since news of Hopkins's extensive plagiarism began circulating, the most frequent informal response has been a rather defensive "but things were different back then." This retort, however, disregards ample evidence that while conceptions of plagiarism have changed across time, place, and genre, they have consistently been identified as a problem. Even a brief look at the changing nineteenth-century views toward the unattributed appropriation of material demonstrates that Hopkins's practices would not be found acceptable by most of the reading public. For example, accompanying the Romantic period's celebration of the heroic genius-author, there emerged "plagiarism hunters": the term coined by Robert Macfarlane for critics who made careers out of accusing other writers of plagiarism (42). By the second half of the century, however, notions of authorship were becoming somewhat more collective and late century critics...

pdf

Share