With graduate training only in literary research methods, the author built a successful career focused on issues of student plagiarism. Gradually, however, she came to realize that her claims about plagiarism were based on local observation and personal experience; they could not persuade wide audiences. Late in her career, she began doing large-scale, data-based research that allows her to persuade wider audiences; the data-based research has also challenged and revised some of her earlier claims about plagiarism.

This special issue of College English brings together well-established scholars of intellectual property as they present fresh work to the field. Their essays offer wide-ranging, provocative explorations of intellectual property as a cultural artifact over the past three centuries.

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Considers how plagiarism continues to elude definition because teachers cannot possibly formulate and act on a definition of plagiarism that articulates both its textual and sexual work. Discusses linking sexual property to textual transgression and rejecting metaphors in relationship to rejecting plagiarism. Suggests educators stop using the term plagiarism altogether and replace it with “fraud,” “insufficient citation,” and “excessive repetition.”

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I he postmodern penchant for reflexivity has affected all arenas of social research, including composition and rhetoric.Sandra Harding explains the importance of reflexivity as she defines feminist methods: The beliefs and behaviors of the researcher are part of the empirical evidence for (or against) the claims advanced in the results of research.This evidence . . .must be open to critical scrutiny no less than what is traditionally defined as relevant evidence....This kind of relationship between the researcher and the object of research is usually discussed under the heading of the "reflexivity of social science."(9) Reflexivity encourages a questioning of the most basic premises of one's discipline.Charles Bazerman, whose essay "The Interpretation of Disciplinary Writing" appears in Writing the Social Text, describes the fruits of interrogating one's discipline: "By reflection one can come to know the systems of which one is part and can act with greater self-conscious precision and flexibility to carry forward and, if appropriate, reshape the projects of one's discipline" (37).