Toward A New Content for Writing Courses: Literary Forgery, Plagiarism, and the Production of Belief

Abstract

More than a decade and a half ago, Susan Miller argued in Textual Carnivals that, in focusing its disciplinary research questions on process, composition has diverted attention away from the politics that contribute to a text’s social and political reception and consequences. In shaping a disciplinary research agenda around the notion that anyone can write, composition has rendered unnecessary discussions of the political forces that designate some writers “important” and others not. Miller writes,