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Recently I came across the following entry in one of my student's journals: "I like the writing groups, but I don't use the advice because then the paper would not be my own. I feel that my writing is my writing and should not be based upon what advice is given by others" (emphasis added). Barbara was one of the best students in my basic writing class that semester. In her essays, she raised intelligent questions, and she took a great deal of pride in her writing and in her grades. During peer groups, both small groups and one-on-one, she actively participated, providing serious readings of her peers' texts as well as thoughtful commentary. So her comments came as a surprise to me. If she valued peer comments and if she gave them herself, why would she not want to use peer feedback to improve her own writing? Where do students get their understanding of what it means to "own" one's text? How do these beliefs shape their practices in writing groups?
In this paper I want to argue that students' attitudes about authorship and intellectual property rights are, among other things, evidence of certain cultural "habits of mind," habits which are shaped throughout their lifetimes and which they bring to their interpretations of the writing group experience. To understand these habits, I first look at Western historical influences that have contributed to current concepts of textual ownership. Writing groups, I believe, mirror the tensions between the public and the private, the individual and the communal, that occur in every sphere when the question of intellectual property arises. By examining historically the complex, deeply enmeshed relationship between the reading (and writing) public and the writer for control of the text, I show that the tensions that arise from this relationship emerge across cultural periods. However, at different times, in response to specific economic and social conditions, either an individual or a communal perspective will seem to dominate.
I begin with an historical overview of perceptions of literary products as public and/or private property and then explore conflicts in legal notions of textual ownership relating to the "fiction" of private labor in the debate over copyright and the "problem" of the idea/expression dichotomy in American Constitutional...