(Download) "Diversity, Change, Violence: Octavia Butler's Pedagogical Philosophy." by Utopian Studies # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Diversity, Change, Violence: Octavia Butler's Pedagogical Philosophy.
- Author : Utopian Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 219 KB
Description
The deliberate and relentless depiction of violence in Octavia Butler's science fiction is striking. Her books are full of conflict that ranges from nuclear war to suburban looting, child abuse to concentration-camp slavery, self-defense to deliberate genocide. Within this violent world, her characters consistently encounter dramatic changes in cultural and bodily identity as they form new and strange family groups. Butler uses classically fantastic constructions such as vampires, aliens, and telepaths to present both the radical degree of separating difference and the extraordinary extent of intersubjective joining necessary to her project, as she engages the problematic idea that unity in community is a utopian prospect. The community structures she presents are soaked with explicit and implicit violence, inherent in both their origins and in the way their structure is controlled by determined, essentialist elements--whether genetic, pathological, or technological. Butler depicts violence between children and parents, teachers and students, alien protectors and human subjects, the infectors and the infected. Even the most caring and protective relationships are revealed to be inherently dangerous in their very intimacy and isolation. Again and again, Butler envisions a seeming-utopia whose hidden stagnation is suddenly ripped open by the violence of change. Butler's characters exist in worlds that require them constantly to learn and teach in order to adapt. This learning process is not benign, however. From Patternmaster to Fledgling, Butler's novels portray the process of maturing and discovering the world to be dangerous and violent. Students are just as dangerous to teachers as teachers are to students. Thus, the learning that goes on in these novels does not follow either typical utopian or dystopian forms. According to Baccolini and Moylan, "the eutopian plot [consists] of dislocation, education, and return of an informed visitor" whereas a dystopia begins in medias res with a slow realization of and confrontation with the dominant culture, usually via "reappropriation of language" (6). Butler's characters do not so much confront the dominant culture as find themselves learning and teaching because of its violence. The more they resist the lesson, the more they learn; the best teacher of all is the violent encounter with inevitable change.
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