(DOWNLOAD) "Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, And Human Purposes in Octavia Butler's Parables. (Essays on Octavia Butler)." by Utopian Studies # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, And Human Purposes in Octavia Butler's Parables. (Essays on Octavia Butler).
- Author : Utopian Studies
- Release Date : January 01, 2003
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 246 KB
Description
LIKE OTHER DYSTOPIAN WRITERS, Octavia Butler perceives dangerous tendencies in contemporary society and intensifies them in her imagined futures in order to forewarn of the perils latent in the present and to encourage readers to think and act to prevent possible dystopian futures. Using a traditional dystopian strategy, she seeks to "map, warn, and hope"--where "to hope" includes to suggest directions towards a better world (Sargent 7-9). In her Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), the first two books of her new Parable series, she portrays two dystopias in the United States in the years following 2024, displays their power, pervasiveness, and devastating effects, and suggests new, utopian alternatives. Butler presents the reader with "mental images" (More 106) or "cognitive maps" (Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping") of future dystopias. Weaving together the imagined future development of contemporary tendencies such as increasing social divisions, economic inequality, global warming, and the political fantasies of the anti-government right (in Sower) and the religious right (in Talents), Butler generates detailed depictions of "social totalities" that contextualize the tendencies into concrete institutions, practices, and personal experiences. She sketches individuals' lives and relationships at the local, state, and (to some extent) international levels. Butler links dreams and nightmares, showing how future dystopias result from current utopian dreams (and political power) of certain segments of American society; and she then shows how the dystopias limit the lives and twist the dreams of the many: their everyday life is tenuous and insecure, their possibilities for a better way of life are constricted, and their alternatives in dystopia are grim, doomed, or self-destructive.
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