Meta-ideologies of Textuality: Authorship, Plagiarism, Copyright

Abstract

Few manifestations of intertextuality are better known than plagiarism and copyright infringement, yet few have been less studied by linguistic anthropologists. A variety of textual ideologies of plagiarism and copyright are evident in English composition pedagogy and intellectual-property law, some more and some less author-centric or committed to the values of individuality and originality. The tension between them is articulated in sophisticated arguments, in the course of which the disputants draw explicit attention to the ideological character of the debate, giving it a reflexive, meta-ideological cast. These lay ascriptions of ideology play a wider variety of roles than do ascriptions by linguistic anthropologists—for example, to delegitimize expansive copyright jurisprudence, ward off plagiarism accusations, and rally support for the cultural commons. To facilitate the analysis, a cognitive account of language ideology is developed along with notions of accentuation, focalization, and peripheralization that can be of use in the study of language ideology more generally.