Alert! Following Andrew Offenburger’s plagiarism accusations against Zakes Mda – which first surfaced on Saturday – Oxford University Press, publisher of the Mda novel at the centre of the controversy, The Heart of Redness, has issued a statement that would appear to pull the author some distance out of harm’s way from the career-damaging allegations.
According to OUP, JB Peires, whose The Dead Will Arise Offenburger accuses Mda of plagiarising, is satisfied with the acknowledgment of his work that Mda makes in his novel’s dedication. The acknowledgment reads: “I am grateful… to Jeff Peires, whose research – wonderfully recorded in The Dead Will Arise and in a number of academic papers – informed the historical events in my fiction.”
Peires further told OUP Managing Director Lieze Kotzé that he himself referred to The Heart of Redness in the 2003 edition of his book, which, he said, benefited from a resurgence of interest following the publication of Mda’s novel.
Peires’ statement, combined with Mda’s refutation of the charges – published in the same journal as Offenburger’s article and asserting that the ground Offenburger has covered is not new, having previously been examined by other scholars – would seem to blunt Offenburger’s attack. Here’s the complete OUP statment:
Alleged plagiarism in The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda
A critique by Yale PhD student Andrew Offenburger published in the American journal Research in African Literature has claimed that Oxford author Zakes Mda “plagiarized” the work of Eastern Cape historian Jeff Peires in Peires’s The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856-7.
The journal article states that through the use of paraphrased lines, Mda accumulates “an inordinate debt” to Peires’s work, first published in 1989 and republished by Jonathan Ball.
“The Heart of Redness has been variously acknowledged as a seminal work and a great African novel. It won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize, Africa Region, and the 2001 Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and is now prescribed as a school setwork,” said Oxford University Press Southern Africa Managing Director Lieze Kotzé.
“As publishers, we were always conscious of the similarities between Mda and Peires’s works. Mda has in his book fully acknowledged his sources, including Jeff Peires’s book,” she said.
“The two books are different genres, and try to apprehend reality at different levels.
“Jeff Peires telephonically confirmed to us today that he was satisfied with the acknowledgement received in The Heart of Redness.
“He pointed out that in the afterword to the 2003 edition of The Dead Will Arise, he himself refers to The Heart of Redness, and the renewed attention given to his own work through the publication in 2001 of Mda’s fictional narrative.”
The original edition of The Dead Will Arise won the 1989 Alan Paton Award for non-fiction.
Other novels published by Zakes Mda with Oxford University Press are Ways of Dying and The Madonna of Excelsior.
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July 22nd, 2008 @15:37 #
I'm very glad it's (seemingly) resolved. They're both wonderful books for different reasons. I loved the The Dead Will Arise, it's the kind of non-fiction that's written with a ferocious passion and impeccable research that tosses you headlong into the story. No dry history this. Brilliant in-depth insight into the context of the cattle killings, strong personalities, stupidity on both sides (more idealistic blindness from the Xhosa leaders; more willful cruelty and arrogant from the colonials who used the widespread famine as an excuse to implement the first dom-pass system.) It's a marvelous, marvelous book.
July 22nd, 2008 @21:44 #
Having read Offenburger's article and Mda's response, it is clear that Mda borrowed a heck of a lot from Jeff Peires's book, "paraphrasing, borrowing sections sequentially, copying and replicating semantic strategies." Mda does not dispute this. Rather, he claims that by thanking Peires in the Dedication, saying that his book "informed" The Heart of Redness, he has earned the right to borrow from The Dead Will Arise at will, without citing the specific instances of those borrowings.
Here's an example:
Peires - "Khoi women prostituted themselves and risked their lives to smuggle [. . .] a cannister of powder to the Kat River rebels." (p18)
Mda - "Khoikhoi women sold their bodies to the British soldiers in order to smuggle canisters of gunpowder to their fighting men." (p22)
The borrowing is clear. The sentence owes itself completely to Peires' sentence. Here's another:
Peires - "in April 1850 Wilhelm became the first Xhosa to be confirmed as an Anglican. He could recite the creed, the Lord’s prayer, the ten commandments and most of the translated Anglican liturgy in Xhosa [. . .]." (p35)
Mda - "Wilhelm Goliath boasted that he was the first umXhosa ever to receive the Anglican Communion. He could recite the Creed, all Ten Commandments in their proper order, and the Lord’s Prayer." (p53)
This kind of borrowing occurs dozens more times.
But, so what? I mean, c'mon, we live in the postmodern era, in which sampling, riffing and borrowing are common to many artistic creations, right? If that's the case, then why fault Mda for borrowing? The answer is that, The Heart of Redness borrows from Peires' work without any sense of limits. Offenburger documents 88 specific times! (all listed side-by-side in the article) And more importantly, Mda never cited the actual instances where he borrowed.
This scholarly debate between Offenburger and Mda begs us to ask: how much borrowing can an artist make of another writer's work before "intertextuality" becomes "plagiarism"? And what is the acceptable form of acknowledging that borrowing?
To get at this question, it's helpful to consider how a professor might respond to a student who has written a short story that is full of the words, lines, phrases, and sequences from another text. When the professor quizzes the student about these borrowings, imagine the student responding, "But professor, I thanked the writer in the dedication! Plus, he himself is a friend and said it was OK."
Do you think the professor would be satisfied? It's doubtful. University plagiarism policies usually require students to cite EACH instance of borrowing. One cannot simply offer a single blanket acknowledgment to another writer, then borrow from his text willy-nilly. Thanking another writer for "informing" one's work is not the same as citing the specific instances in which one borrowed from another's text.
And that's the crux of of this plagiarism debate: Mda thanks Peires in a general sort of way for "informing" his creation; he doesn't tell us how or where that informing took place. Given that this acknowledgment is made in the Dedication, it also sounds as if he's simply thanking Peires for inspiring his work, as opposed to actually "forming" it. The casual reader would have no clue as to how thankful Mda should be! (In fact, none of us would, unless Offenburger had pointed it out.)
In no other artistic medium would this be acceptable. In music, every instance of borrowing (like sampling) is legally documented in the credits; formal permissions are sought from the original creator or copyright owner. Mda suggests that this wasn't necessary because Peires was fine with all of the borrowing (as the response from Oxford UP suggests).
But frankly, it doesn't matter how Peires feels. Plagiarism charges aren't meant to be arbitrated by the creator of the original text (who, in this case, has a conflict of interest, since Mda's book actually spurred sales of his own). It is to be judged according to principle: whether a writer used the ideas of another writer without proper citation/acknowledgement. The protocal Mda should have followed was to either seek formal permission for all borrowings or to cite them in an endnotes section. That's what the hypothetical professor would have said to the student (if the student wasn't expelled).
Indeed, if Mda had followed the rules of citation that are taught to every first semester student at varsity, two things would have happened: we would have gained a proper appreciation of Peires' contribution to Mda's book; and Offenburger would have had to find some other Eastern Cape mystery to investigate.
But what of the claim that Mda has already dealt with these claims by other scholars and, therefore, Offenburger's charge is neither novel nor important? Well, that other scholars have pointed out similarities between the two books simply means that Offenburger isn't alone in being worried. But, in reality, only one other scholar has done some serious documentation of Mda's borrowing, but this was an Honour's student at an Italian university who wrote her thesis on The Heart of Redness. Obviously, besides Mda (to whom this student presumably sent a copy of her thesis), very few other people have read her findings. Thus Offenburger can be credited for being the first to set this forth in a public forum.
But never mind that. More importantly, what about Mda's and Oxford UP's claim that, since The Heart of Redness is a work of fiction (a different genre than The Dead Will Arise), we should not hold the story to the same standard of citation or plagiarism that we apply elsewhere? It sounds reasonable on first blush, but it's just not true. For instance, writers must also get permission to reprint song lyrics, poems, or pieces of fiction. Moving between genres doesn't change the fact that the borrowed text originated from elsewhere. The same holds for fiction writers who extract from non-fiction works.
And in this case, it's not that Peires simply provided the details of Mda's historical sensibility; it's that Mda borrowed directly from the words, lines, sequences and plot conventions that Peires created.
Consider the following passage:
Peires - "They drove their precious cattle to mountainous and secluded places." (p71)
Mda - "Cattle owners were trying to escape it by driving their herds to mountainous and secluded places." (p55)
The troubling image that comes to mind is of Mda typing his novel with Peires' dog-eared book next to him, supplying him with one line after another. In this quote, it feels as if he simply copied it straight from Peires, as is shown in the peculiar phrase, "mountainous and secluded places." Surely Mda could have used his artistic license to re-imagine the scene. Or, if not, he could have included an unobtrusive endnote at the back of the book letting us know that it was Peires who created this phrase. Because, if this phrase was so important to Mda that he could not even re-write in his own words, then surely it's important enough for us to know who to credit for that gem of a phrase.
But, OK, let's pull back and look at the bigger picture. After all, as we all know, this is much more than just an "academic" discussion. Lurking beneath the surface of this debate is the fact that we in South Africa feel emotionally attached to The Heart of Redness and its author. For Mda captured the imagination of this country in the post-apartheid moment; indeed, we continue to feel grateful to him. Plus, he is judged to be a writer of immense talent. Hence, none of us would like to see him or his wonderful book tainted by the charge of plagiarism. The very idea does not sit well with anyone who cares about South African fiction.
So what if the evidence proves that Mda breached a central tenet of artistic principle and integrity by plagiarizing from The Dead Will Arise? Do we condemn him forever? Do we let him off the hook? Or, might we use this event to clarify our expectations of authors and the credit they give to their sources?
Peronally, I'm for the last option.
I don't care about judging Mda, the man. But his book deserves to be read in a new light, very much in conjunction with The Dead Will Arise. Teachers should assign the books together, then include the debate between Offenburger and Mda. Then students could try to refine their understanding of literary license and artistic integrity, and how we should feel about it. After all, the ethics and principles that guide us are more important than the personalities of any one writer or critic. We owe it to ourselves to search for the larger meanings in this debate.
Many thanks to BOOK SA for providing a space to discuss it.
July 22nd, 2008 @22:26 #
Thanks for your own lucid contribution, Henry.
July 23rd, 2008 @06:45 #
Henry rightly points out that we South Africans have a vested interest in a happy ending emerging from this debate. It is hard not to prickle on behalf of a local hero and the temptation is to disregard the accusations, however scholarly they may be.
I'm still trying to get my head around the highly complex issue of intertextuality vs. plagiarism, but governed as I am by strong feelings on the matter I'm not clear yet on the meaning and sense I can make of it.
In my web wandering I came across these links to Offenburger's website dedicated to the study of Xhosa Cattle Killing:
http://www.xhosacattlekilling.net/abouttheproject.asp
and to his journal, Safundi:
http://www.safundi.com/
Now I'm looking for the website that explains why the very mention of the P-word makes my hair stand on end.
The question I want answered is whether one can be unwittingly complicit in writerly activity that leaves one open to an attack of this nature.
I carry a digital voice recorder because I genuinely can't remember what speakers say. Having transcribed a lecture into a write up, might I not absorb another's words without intending to? And might that absorption not replicate itself in my own texts at a later stage, completely unintended?
There must be studies on memory that explain how an author might integrate the text "mountainous and secluded" into his or her own work without necessarily "typing his novel with Peires' dog-eared book next to him..."
July 23rd, 2008 @09:22 #
Great points, Henry (and now I'm going to have to go and read the Offenburger piece in full) I really like your suggestions of studying the books together and using the comparisons to open up a debate about plagiarism / fair use / crediting sources appropriately.
July 23rd, 2008 @10:40 #
Liesl, you're absolutely right that texts can become cross-pollinated through memory. Many stories include unconscious borrowings that are, otherwise, quite innocent. But in Mda's case, he readily admitted that he borrowed from Peires (in his response article to Offenburger).
He says that he borrowed from Peires because "I was quite satisfied with Peires’ version of events not because it presented the sole “truth,” but because it served my fiction effectively." So Mda doesn't say that he accidentally borrowed from Peires, but he did so quite consciously. 88 times, in fact!
(But your point, at a general level, about unconscious borrowing, is quite valid. People do it all the time, though it's usually evident that it's not on purpose.)
The exchange between Offenburger and Mda is available through the journal Research in African Literatures. But the quickest way to get your hands on a copy would be to ask Ben, the editor, for a copy. Or me.
July 23rd, 2008 @11:00 #
Hold horses on that last thought of Henry's, all. The articles are for sale via the Indiana U Press site -
http://inscribe.iupress.org/doi/pdf/10.2979/RAL.2008.39.3.164
and
http://inscribe.iupress.org/doi/pdf/10.2979/RAL.2008.39.3.200
- and I'm not convinced it would serve much purpose to deepen the plagiarism controversy by distributing copyrighted/for-sale texts gratis, if you follow.
If someone can find a link to a free version of the text, please do post it here.
(Those who have Henry's email address can of course contact him direct! One could also probably contact Offenburger through his site.)
July 23rd, 2008 @13:04 #
I think a good work of plagiarism deserves a place of honour in the literary cannon. Sitting with someone's text besides you paraphrasing it is no easy task, as any matric history essayist can attest.
The award for the greatest plagiarised text in history goes to Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon. This is a chinese installment in the Harry Potter series, with 98% of the text plagiarised verbatim from the Hobbit.
In Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon Bilbo Baggins has been replaced by Harry Potter with judicious use of a text editor. The novel includes two original scenes: the opening scene where Potter turns into a hobbit, and the final scene where Harry hobbit turns back into a human.
July 23rd, 2008 @13:07 #
I think that too often the lines between plagiarism, on the one hand, and borrowing, allusion, intertextuality, influence, informing and inspiration, on the other, are fudged to such an extent that the latter terms and their kin become euphemisms for plagiarism.
I haven't read Mda's novel, Peires's book, nor the Offenburger article, but it is clear from Henry's discussion that Mda used several sentences and phrases from Peires, and they are uses which step beyond allusion and inspiration; certainly they step beyond the idea of informing. The "use" is quite literal, whereas with "informing" one imagines a more figurative meaning: Peires's book provides valuable information which gives the writer historical knowledge, a sense of the time, etc., and the writer works with that at the back of his mind. As Henry suggests, the Peires book is foregrounded in the acknowledgement and in the actual use.
The problem with the fact that it is fiction is not so much as to how one credits such borrowing; specific referencing (footnotes? endnotes?) would actually make it a more theoretically acceptable instance of postmodern intertextuality (as in Eliot's The Waste Land) - i.e. it is a novel with stylistic attributes of the academic monograph, and it would play with the transgression of conventions between fiction and historical research. A reader would be crossing between the two as they noted a word or phrase borrowed from a history book in a fiction book. But generally, because readers of fiction do not expect scholarly-like referencing, and perhaps would see this as an intrusion, it would render the work less artful, in a way; or at least it would render the reading of the fiction as an activity less prone to the seductions of the art of the fiction.
And it is this which is the real problem - and not whether the borrowings are acknowledged sufficiently or not. The troubling aspect would be the dependence of the fiction on the borrowings. If one were to delete all the instances of borrowed phrases and sentences, how would this impinge on the stylistic quality and the narrative force of those particular sections? That would be the real test.
July 23rd, 2008 @17:41 #
Ingrid Winterbach offers a tantalising intertextual puzzle in one of her earlier works - Karolina Ferreira, which was published in 1993 under the pseudonym Lettie Viljoen. (It was later translated, and published in 2005 as The Elusive Moth - a wonderful book.) This example of intertextual 'borrowing' has long intrigued me, as it involves another discipline; that of painting - more specifically, the paintings of Frida Kahlo. Without any overt reference to, or acknowledgement of this artist, the writer creates two characters (Adelia Farber and Fernes Ramirez)who are strongly reminiscent of Kahlo and Diego Riviera. Adelia is an artist, and the author gives the reader a detailed description of her paintings, as photographic images emerging from an envelope sent to her friend. (I hope this rambling getting-to-the-point makes sense.) These extemely well-written descriptions (Winterbach is a very accomplished visual artist as well as one of South Africa's finest authors) are all of Frida Kahlo's work; those iconic images found everywhere nowadays. I suppose my question is this: if it is acceptable to appropriate a 'real, living' artist's body of work as something that was 'created' by one's own, invented, fictional character, why not then appropriate the words and dialogue of characters in other books, or, for that matter, the words of real, living people? Is there a dilemma here, or am I making things way to complicated? Or is it simply a question of how elegantly one transgresses?
July 23rd, 2008 @21:19 #
In one of my previous lives I was an academic development person at more than one tertiary institution, where my work entailed attempting to mediate essay writing for students and trying to get lecturers to understand why students "plagiarise". It always struck me that academics were frequently slightly hysterical about plagiarism and not a little self-righteous.
So anyway I always love these debates. A couple of months ago I came across this article in the LRB made me laugh out loud... regarding all the issues being discussed here and it also includes homage to David Sedaris... See what you think.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n10/kope01_.html
July 24th, 2008 @07:15 #
Colleen, I'm so with you on the self-righteous tone.
Here's another delicious redux of the topic in Harper's:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387
July 24th, 2008 @12:37 #
Loved the Kevin Kopelson piece, Colleen - especially the following: "There is a big difference between the comparatively rare occasions on which Handel passed off others’ compositions as his own and the far more numerous instances of his using the ideas of others as a jumping-off point for fresh composition. It may seem strange that he needed to do this, but it involves a creative process, not simple larceny.
Or is there? Is there – for me – a difference between what Dean calls ‘creative process’ and ‘simple larceny’? Or rather, between creative process and not so simple larceny. Between process and, oh – just ‘write it!’ (to quote Elizabeth Bishop) – plagiarism.
The answer, by way of explanation for which I offer the following narrative (or confession), is ‘no.’ Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that all such confessions are deceptive. To quote J.D. Salinger (lines I’ve already included in more than one publication):
A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn’t stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride. The thing to listen for, every time, with a public confessor, is what he’s not confessing to. At a certain period of his life (usually, grievous to say, a successful period), a man may suddenly feel it Within His Power to confess that he cheated on his final exams at college, he may even choose to reveal that between the ages of 22 and 24 he was sexually impotent, but these gallant confessions in themselves are no guarantee that we’ll find out whether he once got piqued at his pet hamster and stepped on its head."
July 24th, 2008 @13:53 #
Glad you liked the Kopelson piece and nice to to have you on Book SA!
July 24th, 2008 @19:50 #
My two cents:
It is important to bear in mind the territory from which Offenburger makes his accusations: the territory of academia. They thus carry with them academia's desire for control of all texts, its urge to capture, hold and superimpose upon, its arrogation of the rights to the final word. Academia is a law unto itself - it has the mechanisms to hold texts to standards of its own devising. Offenburger uses them to make an open and closed, black and white case against Mda.
But there is another territory to consider, one of greys: the territory of art. In this territory texts are created that are beyond academia's hermeneutical horizon, that slip through the gaps of its totalizing project. It is natural that academia should eye these texts with suspicion: anything that refuses crystallization is repugnant in a world that sets standards.
And, too, there is another academic to consider, JB Peires. Peires found Mda's acknowledgment sufficient. It been suggested that we discount this, because Peires has an interest in promoting Mda's work. But there are others who may have interests in this affair: it might be said, for instance, that Offenburger's actions penetrate beyond the chaste question of authorial propriety and serve to raise his professional profile (the charge of plagiarism is about the most sensational J'accuse an academic can make); or that, by debunking a major text, he repositions his Cattle Killing Project so that it occupies the centre of authority. Let us say, then, that agendas cancel other agendas out, and take Peires at his word.
Peires is a top South African scholar. Call him a dissident scholar, in contrast to Offenburger's orthodoxy, because, by accepting Mda's acknowledgment as sufficient, he accepts the possibility of a world of greys. The thoughts of a top scholar are not nothing: indeed, they are potentially oppositional to the thoughts of other scholars; they are potentially standard-setting.
And this, for me, is the crucial point. Notwithstanding Henry's lucid and reasonable account of Mda's transgressions, and the reasons for considering them as such, the fact hasn't changed that Peires the academic accepts Mda the artist's acknowledgment, which is a gift to the novel that permits it wholly to inhabit the territory of art. This means that in a top scholar's opinion, the question of the book's literary merit is the central one in relation to the value of the work. If follows that Offenburger has only succeeded in rejuvenating this question with his accusations: he has not displaced it, not succeeded in crystallizing The Heart of Redness as "that work with plagiarism at its heart", not transported the book to a world of blacks and whites. We remain in a grey territory, where art rules.
July 25th, 2008 @01:28 #
;) Ben, do you have any unresolved issues with academia that we need to know about? Ha ha. I jest, but your description of the academy (and by extension, the people who inhabit it) is...well...brutal. It also sounds quite certain. Is there no grey area in the academy, no "art", so to speak? Certainly not every academic is an automoton beholden to this "law unto itself," are we? (Oh wait, I'm getting a message from the Borg Academic Collective: "resistance is futile!")
Jesting aside, I'm not sure Offenburger's charge is based on any desire to "control all texts." It's more likely that, while he was reading up on the Cattle Killing for his research, he noticed the similarities between Mda's and Peires's text. Of that, no one disagrees, neither Mda nor Peires. So we need not impute ill-intent to this student just because he pointed out the similarities publicly and came to the conclusion that those similarities amounted to plagiarism. It's not an unreasonable conclusion, even if it might be debateable. Nor is it undeserving of discussion, even if it makes us uncomfortable since it concerns an esteemed national icon.
But beyond that, you raise two very interesting issues, Ben. First, you mention the "grey area" of "art" that is beyond "academia's hermeneutical horizon." I sense that you're getting at the idea that there is a distinction between the two realms, and that the standards established in academia shouldn't always be applied to art. I'd like to know more about that. Intuitively, I'm open to the idea.
But it would have to be based on more than a caricature of "academia" as a control-seeking "law unto itself" and art as something that is almost magical and beyond human judgment. I appreciate that art can be mysterious and slippery, but I hope that doesn't mean that we cannot then discuss it and come to certain conclusions about it. I assume that artists have ethical guidelines that they try to abide by; or do they have no boundaries?
Second, you imply that if Peires accepts Mda's acknowledgment, then we should too. I'm sure most people felt this when they read of Peires's assent. At an emotional level, I am drawn to this argument too. It offers the prospect for resolution in what is a highly contentious issue. After all, if Peires doesn't care about the borrowing, then why should we?
Well, the main reason is because he isn't the only one affected by the Mda's borrowing. Readers are too. We are duped, in a way, when we are lead to believe that we should credit one writer with creative genius, when in fact we owe it to other writers as well, whose words are presented in the text. It is this public deception (intentional or not) that gives the charge of plagiarism its weight. "We" (not just the sourced writer) is aggrieved. And it is "we", the public, that usually decides the fate of the "offending" author, not the private feelings of the sourced writer.
What worries me about relying on Peires to make up our mind on this ethical matter is the fact that we already have public standards -- principles and definitions -- that can better help us weigh the evidence of this plagiarism charge. That's why I think it's unnecessary to guess at the motivations of Offenburger, Mda, or Peires. Such musings just confuse the issue. For the texts are there for us to look at and judge for ourselves. And it also allows us to judge the EFFECTS of artistic borrowings without getting ensnared in guessing the writer's/critic's INTENTIONS.
But if there is one thing that is clear, it is that South African literature has a powerful ally and booster in BOOK SA. It is good that Ben reminds us how art indeed transports us beyond the banal and mundane into an almost magical space "where art rules." That's why we treasure it so much. It also helps us to reflect with greater insight into our reality. But while I empathize with this spirited defense of art, does it mean that we have no room to speak up?
July 25th, 2008 @10:40 #
Thanks, Henry. No, no latent issues with academia! (Note that I say "academia", not "academics". For academics, there are plenty of shades of grey. Despite nuance at the particulate level, however, academia remains an engorger of texts - which doesn't mean it doesn't have the right to scrutinize them.) My point boils down to this: Offenburger's article enhances rather than displaces the central question related to The Heart of Redness, which is the question of its literary merit.
If there had been no acknowledgment from Mda, then Offenburger's charges would be more effective in their discrediting of the text (I take it I can count that as an aim because of the language he uses, which is quite aggressive). Indeed, the question of literary merit would have been blown right out of the water. But the acknowledgment defuses the charges to a degree; and Peires' stance on the issue defuses them further, in that his reading of the text, as an academic, differs from Offenburger's, implying a different set of standards by which to judge the work.
This means we owe Offenburger a debt of gratitude for shedding more light on the book - and we should certainly change the way we read the book - but at the same time it gives us scope to question his "call it like I see it" approach.
July 26th, 2008 @22:25 #
Well said, Ben. You make a good point. Meanwhile, Offenburger has posted some info about his argument on his website. Rather interesting:
http://www.andrewoffenburger.com/theheartofredness.asp
July 28th, 2008 @17:32 #
Excellent link, Henry. And meanwhile I see that our friends at Kagablog have posted Mda's response in its entirety:
http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2008/07/23/on-the-heart-of-redness-zakes-mda-responds-to-charges-of-plagiarism/