I Sold My Soul to Derrida

HAVE YOU EVER written a line into a paper just because it agrees with the professor's thesis? Ever repeat jargon and buzzwords from lecture in your assignments just to sound like you know what you are talking about and can get rewarded with a little check mark in the margin? Ever use literary or historical theories because your teaching fellow likes them even though you fundamentally disagree?

Plagiarism is officially the only paper-writing no-no we are supposed to worry about. The Ad Board insists that students cite quotes correctly, don't turn in the same paper to two classes and include correct footnotes. But they could probably care less if we totally misconstrue Marxist theory or get our signifiers and signifieds mixed up.

I don't intend to scare anyone during the continual paper-writing frenzy that characterizes every second of our existence during the term. But isn't tailoring papers to attract the favorable attention of a grader selling out? Aren't we losing any hope of intellectual integrity by conforming the language and ideas in our papers to get better grades?

WHEN IT COMES to writing a paper, I know we need all the advantages we can get. At three a.m., who has the energy to go searching for an original thought when you can pick up a piece of assigned reading and apply one of the ready-made theoretical approaches? This is sort of what we are supposed to be doing anyway.

The theories we learn are tools to get at whatever subject we are studying. They are around because they help people to understand the significance of the material. That's why Marx and Sassure and Derrida and all those other icons of socio-eco-polilinguistic theory exist. The problem, however, is that no matter how smart we are, we are not as smart as these people yet. (That's part of the reason why we have so much trouble coming up with original ideas.)

We need to paraphrase, simplify and contextualize large theoretical ideas in order to use them in a 5-7 page paper due several hours in the future. That's why we have books of "Great Thoughts," "Bartlett's Quotations" and Cliff Notes. Needless to say, in the crunch, a lot of the meaning gets lost and we end up sounding muddled.

When I was debating in high school, we put a lot of effort into collecting the opinions of experts to support our cases. We would pull out neatly-filed index cards during rounds and fire quotes at our opponents at mind-boggling speeds. What it always came down to, however, was our expert statistics versus theirs. The only thing we ever accomplished was amusing our judges.

In a lot of cases, that's what writing a paper comes down to--citing supporting evidence in a kind of index card frenzy to prove that you know what you are talking about. We tag on a quote from Max Weber or Simone de Beauvoire to an idea of our own with the prayer that we will magically assume his or her authority. It often ends up as our experts against somebody else's--Hume vs. Locke, Marx vs. Hegel. The only thing we accomplish is making our TF's pull all-nighters to finish grading.

I FALL INTO THIS TRAP of trying to please my graders every time I write a paper. Here's an example from a paper I wrote on Tess of the d'Urbervilles for my sophomore English tutorial:

"The narrator breaks the omniscient system to protect Tess from direct involvement in sins for which the reader will immediately condemn her in an absolute moral sense."

Let's deconstruct.

First, the word narrator. I think that this is the most important buzzword for any English concentrator, or any student dealing with a fictional text, to learn. In fiction, if you call the narrator something like "the author," any teaching fellow who plans on finishing graduate school will turn your paper into cream cheese. The narrator carries out most of the functions of the author in terms of being able to construct the text.

In most texts (which used to be called books), narrator can also be a tricky word because the third-person voice doesn't necessarily have to be the one telling the story all the time. Speaker is a good substitute. Persona works in poems. But when there are a lot of characters, it's best to refer to everyone by name, but only if you make sure to explain how the naming of people functions in the text.

The omniscient system is a complete buzzword from my tutorial. I was almost tempted to use the phrase "hermeneutics of suspicion," which was the other great term, but I never figured out what it meant. What the omniscient system is all about, rather simply, is that some higher being knows everything that's going on in the story (usually it is the person who thought up the story in the first place).

What I meant to say in real terms was that the author (forgive me, but in this case it applies), deliberately leaves out some information about the characters. Of course, this is a fallacy in itself because I would hope that everything an author does is deliberate. The word breaking, like constructing and building, comes from one of those futile attempts to allude to the structuralist movement.

Mentioning reader-response was my wimpy attempt to subvert having to make categorical statements about what the author was trying to do. If I learned anything about theory as an English concentrator, I know not to assign any importance to authorial intent.

In an absolute moral sense, I have an absolute moral problem with making absolute statements about subjects that inherently rely on absolutes. After two years, I don't remember exactly what I meant by that phrase in my paper. It seems redundant now, not to mention totally devoid of meaning. I suppose it was just one of those late night instances where the words sounded good together.

I HAVE A MILLION more examples of this selling out in my own papers. I'm sure other people do too. Even in this article, I have structurally decomposed one of my own sentences and used empty jargon which is, in itself, selling out.

Most students probably have only one question about this issue--does it work? Well, sure. That's what all of those check marks in the margins, the "v. good's" and the "interesting points" are for in the margins of our papers.

But we get the good comments because our teaching fellows are in exactly the same position as we are. They have to write to please professors and boards of administrators who might hire them. Junior professors do the same to get tenure. The only people who get to say what they want in any way they want are tenured professors.

As students, we are just the bottom of the academic brown-nosing ladder. In theory, we get concerned about the lack of academic freedom for untenured instructors. We feel that they should be able to say whatever they want without fear of repercussions when university committees decide promotions.

What are we doing in our papers that is any different? We don't get published, that's about all. We do, however, write for an audience. But it is supposed to be a general academic one. The fact that only one other person is really ever going to read most of our writing shouldn't scare us into trying to conform to their likes and dislikes.

Tipping the grade scale, therefore, shouldn't be our first consideration. Undergraduates should be exempt from the academic theory feeding frenzy. While we are learning to write papers, we should make an attempt to say what we think first. Academic honesty should be our only priority. Let us not bow to jargon-jockeying this early in our lives.

At three a.m., I always wimp out and opt for jargon-jockeying because I think that my TF will like it.

Ever time I write a paper, I step onto the long ladder of academic brown-nosing.