Ah, thanks.
>And they were. Your reply is better than whatever I might have carved
>out, at least to begin with. This is another kind of plagiarism,
>perhaps? :-)
>
>I simply fwd your post to the English Dept list, thus kicking up (I
>hope) a little storm there, since it's usually pretty quiescent, without
>expounding myself.
Well, it's always fun to shake up English departments. I certainly enjoyed it when I was in one. Stephen Greenblatt officially accused me of "mau-mauing" his class :)...this was a class on Shakespeare and Marxist criticism in which not one word of Marx was assigned...just a bunch of stuff from Geertz and Derrida and Foucault (ok, a little Benjamin too.)
But, I would expect that convincing an academic to take an alternate view of plagiarism is very hard. So much of academic work is based on staking out a piece of intellectual property and talking it up--to raise its value. Of course, now that colleges are not bothering to hire anything more than temps, this might change.
Joanna