Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E Butler written by Tarshia L. Stanley and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Octavia E. Butler's works of science fiction invite readers to consider the structures of power in society and to ask what it means to be human. Butler addresses social justice issues such as poverty, racism, and violence against women and connects the history of slavery in the United States with speculation on a biologically altered future world. The first section of this volume, "Materials," lists secondary sources and interviews with Butler and suggests texts that instructors might pair with her works. Essays in the second section, "Approaches," situate Butler in science fiction, modernism, and Afrofuturism and provide interdisciplinary approaches from political science, philosophy, art, and digital humanities. The contributors present strategies for teaching Butler in literature courses as well as courses designed for adult learners, preservice teachers, and students at historically black colleges and universities.
Download or read book Kindred written by Octavia E. Butler and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2004-02-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Imago written by Octavia E. Butler and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E Butler written by Gregory J. Hampton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Octavia E. Butler is widely recognized today as one of the most important figures in contemporary science fiction. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering Butler's complete works from the bestselling novel Kindred, to her short stories and major novel sequences Patternmaster, Xenogenesis and The Parables, this is the most comprehensive Companion to Butler scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: · Cyborgs and the posthuman · Race and African American history · Afrofuturism · Gender and sexuality · New perspectives from Religious Studies, the Environmental Humanities and Disability Studies · New discoveries from the Butler archives at the Huntington Library The book includes a comprehensive bibliography of works by Butler and secondary scholarship on her work as well as an afterword by the novelist Tananarive Due.
Download or read book Rites of Passage Liminality and Community in Octavia E Butler s Science Fiction Novels written by Lin Knutson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-03-06 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rites of Passage, Liminality, and Community in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction Novels explores the ways in which Octavia Butler’s liminal protagonists undergo ritualized transformations while in exile from their home communities. During this process, they engage in psychological, physical, political, and social transitions through what Victor Turner and Makhail Bakhtin describe as carnivalesque identities. Using postcolonial, feminist, anti-capitalist, and African American theorists, Lin Knutson examines how Butler’s imagined genesis and history carry echoes of American history, slave history, debt slavery, and colonization.
Download or read book Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom written by Laurence W. Mazzeno and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-04-06 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to ‘canonical status’ and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Karen Tei Yamashita written by Ruth Y. Hsu and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structurally innovative and culturally expansive, the works of Karen Tei Yamashita invite readers to rethink conventional paradigms of genres and national traditions. Her novels, plays, and other texts refashion forms like the immigrant tale, the postmodern novel, magical realism, apocalyptic literature, and the picaresque and suggest new transnational, hemispheric, and global frameworks for interpreting Asian American literature. Addressing courses in American studies, contemporary fiction, environmental humanities, and literary theory, the essays in this volume are written by undergraduate and graduate instructors from across the United States and around the globe. Part 1, "Materials," outlines Yamashita's novels and other texts, key works of criticism and theory, and resources for Asian American and Asian Brazilian literature and culture. Part 2, "Approaches," provides options for exploring Yamashita's works through teaching historical debates, outlining principles of environmental justice, mapping geographic boundaries to highlight power dynamics, and drawing personal connections to the texts. Additionally, an essay by Yamashita describes her own approaches to teaching creative writing.
Download or read book Resource Handbook for Academic Deans written by Andrew Adams and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential guide addresses the expanding, multifaceted role of college and university academic leaders. The new edition of the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans, one of the most important offerings to the academic community by the American Conference of Academic Deans, is written by and for academic leaders to address the expanding, multifaceted role of college and university administrators. Each chapter explores a topic related to how higher education leaders are influenced by national events, local partnerships, or on-campus collaborations. Among the topics covered are: • understanding educational policy at the national level • working with leaders from department heads to provosts • engaging with external partners • leading collaborative change at small colleges and universities • shifting toward student-centered campuses • making data-informed decisions • embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion • managing and balancing salaries • building effective leadership teams and mentoring future leaders • holding difficult conversations • returning to the faculty after leadership Providing helpful advice that can be studied in short chapters and inspiring content based on personal experience, the forty-three authors in this volume hold positions from department chairs to presidents at four-year and community colleges across the country. Written during the COVID-19 pandemic and amid calls for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, each chapter offers perceptive insights from experienced leaders who serve a broad range of institutional types.
Download or read book 100 Black Women Who Shaped America written by Glenn L. Starks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introductory text explores the lives of 100 Black women and their unique and meaningful legacies upon the history, society, and culture of the USA. Today, the names and remarkable achievements of Black women such as Maya Angelou, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey are well known to many Americans. Yet throughout American history, many lesser-known Black women like them have made invaluable contributions to sports, science, the arts, medicine, politics, and civil rights. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who published the first newspaper written for and by African American women, championed the cause of women's suffrage. Matilda Sissieretta Jones, whose father was an enslaved person, toured Europe and performed at the White House in front of four different presidents as one of the great sopranos of her generation. Augusta Savage, overcoming racism and sexism, became one of the most celebrated sculptors in history. This book serves as an important reminder that the story of America cannot be told without the Black women who, with strength and determination, have always pushed America forward even when others held them back.
Download or read book Luminescent Threads Connections to Octavia E Butler written by Alexandra Pierce and published by Twelfth Planet Press. This book was released on 2017-08 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luminescent Threads celebrates Octavia E. Butler, a pioneer of the science fiction genre who paved the way for future African American writers and other writers of colour. Original essays and letters sourced and curated for this collection explore Butler’s depiction of power relationships, her complex treatment of race and identity, and her impact on feminism and women in Science Fiction. Follow the luminescent threads that connect Octavia E. Butler and her body of work to the many readers and writers who have found inspiration in her words, and the complex universes she created.
Download or read book Teaching Literature in the Online Classroom written by John Miller and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2022-10-26 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume considers the challenges and opportunities of online literature classes and suggests instructional strategies that ensure students are engaged in the virtual classroom. The ideas shared here are grounded in research, practice, critical self-reflection, and collaboration. Reflecting a diverse collection of practical tips and experiences from colleagues teaching at a variety of institutions, the essays offer readers the chance to inhabit others' classrooms. Contributors discuss building an interactive and inclusive classroom and using hypertext, video lectures, and other asynchronous and synchronous tools in classes whose subjects include, among others, Shakespeare, the Chinese novel, early American literature, speculative fiction, and contemporary American poetry.
Download or read book Fledgling written by Octavia E. Butler and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Octavia E Butler written by Gerry Canavan and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I began writing about power because I had so little," Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman--an alien in American society and among science fiction writers--informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction. Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon. The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction.
Download or read book Human Contradictions in Octavia E Butler s Work written by Martin Japtok and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Emergent Strategy written by adrienne maree brown and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2017-03-20 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride! adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.
Download or read book The American Dream and Dreams Deferred written by Carlton D. Floyd and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-11-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Dream and Dreams Deferred: A Dialectical Fairy Tale shows how rival interpretations of the Dream reveal the dialectical tensions therein. Exploring often neglected voices, literatures, and histories, Carlton D. Floyd and Thomas Ehrlich Reifer highlight moments when the American Dream appears both simultaneously possible and out of reach. In so doing, the authors invite readers to make a new collective dream of a better future, on socially just, multicultural, and ecologically sustainable foundations.
Download or read book Maroons and the Marooned written by Richard Bodek and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-04-20 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Richard Bodek, Claire P. Curtis, Joseph Kelly, Simon Lewis, Steve Mentz, J. Brent Morris, Peter Sands, Edward Shore, and James O'Neil Spady Commonly, the word maroon refers to someone cast away on an island. One becomes marooned, usually, through a storm at sea or by a captain as a method of punishment. But the term originally denoted escaped slaves. Though being marooned came to be associated mostly with white European castaways, the etymology invites comparison between true maroons (escaped slaves establishing new lives in the wilderness) and people who were marooned (through maritime disaster). This volume brings together literary scholars with historians, encompassing both literal maroons such as in Brazil and South Carolina as well as metaphoric scenarios in time-travel novels and postapocalyptic narratives. Included are examples from The Tempest; Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Both runaways and castaways formed new societies in the wilderness. But true maroons, escaped slaves, were not cast away; they chose to fly towards the uncertainties of the wild in pursuit of freedom. In effect, this volume gives these maroons proper credit, at the very heart of American history.
