Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler's Work

Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler's Work PDF Author: Martin Japtok
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030466256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Human Contradictions in Octavia Butler’s Work continues the critical discussions of Butler’s work by offering a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches to Butler’s text. This collection contains original essays that engage Butler’s series (Seed to Harvest, Xenogenesis, Parables), her stand-alone novels (Kindred and Fledgling), and her short stories. The essays explore new facets of Butler’s work and its relevance to philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, women’s studies, religious studies, American studies, and U.S. history. The volume establishes new ways of reading this seminal figure in African American literature, science fiction, feminism, and popular culture.

Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler's Work

Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler's Work PDF Author: Martin Japtok
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030466256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
Human Contradictions in Octavia Butler’s Work continues the critical discussions of Butler’s work by offering a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches to Butler’s text. This collection contains original essays that engage Butler’s series (Seed to Harvest, Xenogenesis, Parables), her stand-alone novels (Kindred and Fledgling), and her short stories. The essays explore new facets of Butler’s work and its relevance to philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, women’s studies, religious studies, American studies, and U.S. history. The volume establishes new ways of reading this seminal figure in African American literature, science fiction, feminism, and popular culture.

Kindred

Kindred PDF Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807083704
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.

Dawn

Dawn PDF Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781538753712
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
One woman is called upon to rebuild the future of humankind after a nuclear war, in this revelatory post-apocalyptic tale from the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower. When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali - a seemingly benevolent alien race -- intervened in the fate of the humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth -- but salvation comes at a price. Hopeful and thought-provoking, this post-apocalyptic narrative deftly explores gender and race through the eyes of characters struggling to adapt during a pivotal time of crisis and change.

Alien Constructions

Alien Constructions PDF Author: Patricia Melzer
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
“An incisive critical work” that looks at Octavia Butler’s writing, the movies of the Matrix and Alien series—and more—through a feminist lens (Femspec). Feminist thinkers and writers are increasingly recognizing science fiction’s potential to shatter patriarchal and heterosexual norms, while the creators of science fiction are bringing new depth and complexity to the genre by engaging with feminist thewories and politics. This book maps the intersection of feminism and science fiction through close readings of science fiction literature by Octavia E. Butler, Richard Calder, and Melissa Scott and the movies The Matrix and the Alien series. Patricia Melzer analyzes how these authors and films represent debates and concepts in three areas of feminist thought: identity and difference, feminist critiques of science and technology, and the relationship among gender identity, body, and desire, including the new gender politics of queer desires, transgender, and intersexed bodies and identities. She demonstrates that key political elements shape these debates, including global capitalism and exploitative class relations within a growing international system; the impact of computer, industrial, and medical technologies on women’s lives and reproductive rights; and posthuman embodiment as expressed through biotechnologies, the body/machine interface, and the commodification of desire. Melzer’s investigation makes it clear that feminist writings and readings of science fiction are part of a feminist critique of existing power relations—and that the alien constructions (cyborgs, clones, androids, aliens, and hybrids) that populate postmodern science fiction are as potentially empowering as they are threatening.

Imago

Imago PDF Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538765489
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
From the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower:After the near-extinction of humanity, a new kind of alien-human hybrid must come to terms with their identity -- before their powers destroy what is left of humankind. Since a nuclear war decimated the human population, the remaining humans began to rebuild their future by interbreeding with an alien race -- the Oankali -- who saved them from near-certain extinction. The Oankalis' greatest skill lies in the species' ability to constantly adapt and evolve, a process that is guided by their third sex, the ooloi, who are able to read and mutate genetic code. Now, for the first time in the humans' relationship with the Oankali, a human mother has given birth to an ooloi child: Jodahs. Throughout his childhood, Jodahs seemed to be a male human-alien hybrid. But when he reaches adolescence, Jodahs develops the ooloi abilities to shapeshift, manipulate DNA, cure and create disease, and more. Frightened and isolated, Jodahs must either come to terms with this new identity, learn to control new powers, and unite what's left of humankind -- or become the biggest threat to their survival.

Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler PDF Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476647461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Slow to rise in the literary world, Octavia Estelle Butler cultivated musings on earth's future, reaching massive critical acclaim in the process. This companion will complement book club discussions and classroom lessons for the closest possible readings of Butler's science fiction and her texts on racism and pollution. A maven of speculative fiction so prescient that it hovers between tocsin and prophecy, Butler survives through her print stories, essays, novels and musings on individualism and compromise. This book guides the reader on a variety of Butler pieces, from her most obscure titles to her historical entries and pieces that speculate upon science, metaphysics, linguistics, psychology, writing and religion. The text serves as a guide through the depths of Octavia Butler's works and reinforces the reasons for which her name so often appears on reading lists for higher learning.

Fledgling

Fledgling PDF Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1583228047
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last novel, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted—and still wants—to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of "otherness" and questions what it means to be truly human.

Bloodchild and Other Stories

Bloodchild and Other Stories PDF Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1583228039
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award. Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which asks: What would you do if God granted you the ability—and responsibility—to save humanity from itself? Like all of Octavia Butler’s best writing, these works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. She proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature’s strongest voices.

The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945

The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945 PDF Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009188216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.

Theory for the World to Come

Theory for the World to Come PDF Author: Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296159X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead