Before Pennycook started to analyze the issue of plagiarism from historical, cultural, and other aspects, there is one passage that I consider as a necessity to understand the essay as a whole, which is, “I found instead that I was rather fascinated by the issues it raised: questions about ownership of texts, practices of memory, and writing. Because all language learning is, to some extent, a practice of memorization of the words of others, on what grounds do we see certain acts of textual borrowing as acceptable and others as unacceptable?” (Penny, 202) This passage, first introduces the background why the author studied the issue of plagiarism and the starting point on which he based his ideas on. With a serious questions followed, the …show more content…
Pennycook wrote in the essay, “the postmodern and poststructuralist positions on language, discourse, and subjectivity, therefore, raise serious questions for any notion of individual creativity or authorship. If, instead of a Self or an Identity, we consider the notion of subjectivity, or indeed subjectivities, then we arrive at more or less a reversal of the speaking subject creating meaning: We are not speaking subjects but spoken subjects, we do not create language but are created by it” (Pennycook, 209). The reversal relationship between the subject and meaning is confusing. By combining with what was written before, I think what the author tried to express is that in the postmodern and poststructuralist era where people believe in the originality of the words neither from God’s words or the great authors and celebrities, eventually the authorship, originality and people’s subjectivities are questioned. The author held the idea that “we do not create language” due to the specialties of language study, what we have been doing is actually a borrowing of language and its recombination. What’s more, just as Pennycook pointed out that we are “the fragments products of different discourses” (209). Our ideas are expressed in a way that combine all fragmentary pieces of words and phrases we have learnt before. And I suppose that is why the author describe people as “created by language”. Still, concepts like “the notion of subjectivity”, “the indeed subjectivities”, and “spoken subjects” perplex me and are not fully