Pro tip: If you’re going to write a paper on giving voice to hidden words, PLEASE try not to plagiarize!
Esther Sánchez-Pardo, of Complutense University in Madrid, was the author of a 2010 article in the European Journal of English Studies titled “Who will carry the word? The threshold between unspeakability and silence in the Holocaust narratives of Charlotte Delbo and Jorge Semprun.”
The problem, it turns out, is that a couple of other authors had their words carried, but Sánchez-Pardo didn’t bother to speak their names.
According to the abstract:
This article is an attempt to go beyond the heated debates over the aesthetics of Holocaust representation into a productive exploration of the politics of memory in the contemporary world. It also engages with current theory in the fields of memory studies, trauma, narratology and life writing, to elucidate what, in particular, the study of these disciplines may contribute to the understanding of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, loss and grief. My hope is that the treatment of memory, trauma and the simultaneity of past pain and its aftermath addressed in the following approaches to Charlotte Delbo – in her trilogy Auschwitz and After – and Jorge Semprun – in his memoir Literature or Life – will be applicable as ‘lessons’ beyond the Holocaust and towards other difficult moments in traumatic history.
But as the notice explains:
The Editors, the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), and Taylor & Francis, publishers, of the European Journal of English Studies are retracting the following article: ‘Who will carry the word? The threshold between unspeakability and silence in the Holocaust narratives of Charlotte Delbo and Jorge Semprun’ by Esther Sánchez-Pardo, European Journal of English Studies, Volume 14, Issue 1, 2010, pp. 37-48, DOI: 10.1080/13825571003588429
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13825571003588429
Subsequent to publication it has been determined that the article contains significant overlap with two other published articles, neither of which was cited or otherwise acknowledged:‘Pleasure, Memory, and Time Suspension in Holocaust Literature: Celan and Delbo’ by Brett Ashley Kaplan, Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 38, Number 4, 2001, pp. 310-329
‘Poetry After Auschwitz: Charlotte Delbo and the Return of the Word’ by Dr Sarah Liu, an excerpt from her dissertation awarded by University of California, Berkeley in May 2000 (http://www.theverylongview.com/WATH/essays/liu1.htm)This represents a breach of ethics and of warranties made by the author with respect to originality and provenance. The Editors, the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), and Taylor & Francis, publishers censure this conduct, and as a result have decided to retract the article from publication. The Editors, the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), and Taylor & Francis, publishers note we received, peer-reviewed, accepted, and published the article in good faith based on these warranties.
The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘retracted’.
The paper has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Plagiarism aside, such unspeakability or silence are two of the untenable ideas of modern literary “criticism” or “theory.” In my humble opinion as a former academic (who cannot stand this kind of nonsense), the sooner we get rid of such ideas of little logical rigor, the better our future would be for humanities and all who study it.