Dávid Kaposi

Discourses of plagiarism: moralist, proceduralist, developmental and inter-textual approaches

This paper reconstructs prevalent academic discourses of student plagiarism: moralism, proceduralism, development, and writing/inter-textuality. It approaches the discourses from three aspects: intention, interpretation and the nature of the academic community. It argues that the assumptions of the moralistic approach regarding suspect intention, the transparency of interpretation, and the homogeneous nature of the academic community are in effect sustained by discourses of proceduralism and development. This results, first, in the simplistic rendition of student identities as honest/dishonest, and, second, in the proposal of or acquiescence to the triad of prevention, detection and punishment. The paper concludes that radical re-conceptualization of plagiarism may only be discovered in the discourse of inter-textuality where intention, interpretation and the academic community are construed as social practices concerning the negotiation of various identities and values – those of students as well as those of academics.

Method of the Analysis and General Characteristics of the Newspapers

This is the first of three (and a half) chapters where the broadsheets’ coverage will be quantitatively analysed. Certain topics will be selected, and we will have a look at how frequently they occurred in the broadsheets’ paragraphs. Thereby, we will learn, for instance, how many times the Guardian mentioned the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in its coverage, and how often the Telegraph mentioned Palestinian civilian death. We will learn how important each of the topics was for the newspapers in general. And we will also learn whether there is any important divergence between newspapers with regard to either specific codes or meaningful clusters of them (such as fatalities or historical context, for instance). Breaking down the newspapers’ coverage into codes is a useful exercise that can help us to characterize the British reception of the ‘Gaza war’ in broad strokes (Richardson, 2007).

Introduction: Violence and Understanding in the Armed Conflict of Gaza

This book presents a case study: it offers an analysis of the British broadsheets’ coverage of a war, examining the breadth and depth of their content, and as such, it attempts to examine various ways of understanding violence.

War — Purity of Arms and Souls in the Conservative Press

The two empirical chapters to conclude this book will move closer to what may be at the heart of the matter. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 concerned explicit textual occurrences and addressed them at their numerical face value. Though Chapters 5 and 6 offered some interpretative analysis concerning the implications of utterances, it was still explicit textual occurrences that were addressed. The current as well as the following chapter, in turn, will take an exclusively interpretative orientation to the analysis of narratives and arguments the editorials of conservative and liberal newspapers utilized to account for the armed conflict of Gaza. That is, this chapter will aim to understand political-moral perspectives.

Engagements with Criticism

The previous chapters addressed the newspapers’ explicit engagements with death, action and historical context. Not only were pieces of data (i.e., paragraphs) identified explicitly, quantitative analysis accounted for what may be termed their explicit, manifest, evident content. From the present chapter on, the course of analysis will progressively become more and more interpretative: concerning more and more implications of engagements with criticism, antisemitism and war.

Engagements with History

The previous chapter started with what may be regarded as the ultimate, unalterable outcome of war. It was the newspapers’ representation of death as a result of the conflict that was first engaged with. Subsequently, the chapter went on to examine how the broadsheets accounted for death: what the sequence of events directly leading to people having died was, and who or what might have been responsible for that. Thus, the previous chapter examined basic facts, events, acts, and acts of explanation. In the main, it was found that whilst representation of death differed between publications, no such systematic difference could be found when it came to provide an account for it. For this reason, it was concluded that further investigation of different contexts is required. This is the first in a succession of chapters that occasion such investigation.

War — Purity of Arms and Souls in the Liberal Press

Our attention will now turn to the liberal press’s account of war and its engagement with issues of law to war and law in war.

Conclusion: Beyond Good and Evil

Examining the British broadsheets’ engagement with the armed conflict of Gaza, this book narrated a story of the war.

Action and Death in War

As we saw in Chapter 1, there are many outcomes of a war. There will be arguments about who won, who is better placed for future political developments. And there will be people mourning. This chapter will start with the analysis of what this book finds to be the only ultimate and unalterable outcome of war: the people dead. It will examine how the national broadsheets made reference to different categories of fatalities and what their coverage might imply.

Engagements with Antisemitism

As reviewed in Chapter 1, the meta-discourses of ‘new antisemitism’ and the ‘anti-new antisemitism’ have a very heavy investment in the status of the British broadsheets in disputes over Israel/Palestine. The arguments usually propose two distinct poles where conservative newspapers would support Israel whilst liberals would criticize Israel and support Palestinians (if not necessarily Hamas). In terms of such polarization, previous chapters offered some interesting insight. Namely, no extraordinary, black-and-white difference could be ascertained as concerned the coverage of fatalities and action in war in the British broadsheet. In terms of historical context, some pronounced divergences appeared to surface, yet they could still not be attributed to straightforward and categorical differences. Resemblance to the theoretical-ideological lines drawn between conservative and liberal newspapers was only detectable when examining explicit engagements with criticism. This concerned not simply the divergence towards poles where (advocates of) either Israelis or Palestinians/Hamas were right/wrong but the virtual impossibility of constructing acceptable positions in-between these black-and-white opposites.