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4 books match the query 'Butler, Octavia E.'

cover of Bookmarks: A Companion Text for Kindred

Bookmarks

A Companion Text for Kindred

Janet Giannotti

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Bookmarks: Fluency through Novels is a series of companion textbooks to novels that provide teachers with creative exercises and activities to supplement the teaching of a novel. Bookmarks: A Companion Text forKindred is an integrated reading-writing skills text that addresses each of the seven intelligences identified by Howard Gardner: there are tasks and activities for the linguistically, logically/mathematically, kinesthetically, spatially, musically, interpersonally, and intrapersonally intelligent students.
The textbook is designed to be used along with Kindred, a novel by Octavia Butler (published by Beacon Press), which tells the story of a young black woman who disappears from her home in 1970s California to save the life of her white slave-owner ancestor in the early nineteenth century. Through the novel and textbook, students learn about nineteenth-century American life, the origins of slavery in America, the conditions under which slaves lived, the Underground Railroad, important historical figures (like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass), and the civil rights movement of the twentieth century.
Each of the six units begins with a preview of the reading and free writing topics, followed by exercises that improve comprehension and vocabulary building. Students use response journals to think about their personal connection with the novel. They are encouraged to discuss different topics and then write about what they've discussed. The Beyond the Novel section in each unit introduces factual background information in which students learn about slavery and other material mentioned in the novel. Puzzles and out-of-class activities are also included at the end of each unit.

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cover of God is Change: Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler

God is Change

Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler

Edited by Aparajita Nanda and Shelby L. Crosby

Temple University Press, 2021

Throughout her work, Octavia E. Butler explored, critiqued, and created religious ideology. Her prescient thoughts on the synergy between politics and religion in America are evident in her 1993 dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower, and its 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents. They explored, respectively, what happens during a divisive “cultural war” that unjustly impacts the disenfranchised, and the rise of a fascistic president, allied with white fundamentalist Christianity, who chants the slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

But religion, for Butler, need not be a restricting force. The editors of and contributors to God Is Change heighten our appreciation for the range and depth of Butler’s thinking about spirituality and religion, as well as how Butler’s work—especially the Parable and Xenogenesis series—offers resources for healing and community building. Essays consider the role of spirituality in Butler’s canon and the themes of confronting trauma as well as experiencing transformation and freedom. God Is Change meditates on alternate religious possibilities that open different political and cultural futures to illustrate humanity’s ability to endure change and thrive.

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cover of RE-FORMING THE PAST: HISTORY, THE FANTASTIC, & THE POSTMODERN SLAVE NARRATIVE

RE-FORMING THE PAST

HISTORY, THE FANTASTIC, & THE POSTMODERN SLAVE NARRATIVE

A. Timothy Spaulding

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature.  In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative’s reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives.

In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.
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cover of Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature

Reading in the Postgenomic Age

Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature

Lesley Larkin

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

In Reading in the Postgenomic Age, Lesley Larkin analyzes how writers across literary genres have reckoned with the launch (in the early 1990s) and completion (in 2003) of the Human Genome Project and the ways it has fallen short of its promise to do away with spurious notions of race. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ruth Ozeki, Rebecca Skloot, Gerald Vizenor, and others demonstrate that genomics is a premier terrain upon which race is being reinscribed and reimagined in both scientific and mainstream contexts. Through construction of alternate genealogies, invention of hybrids, and citation of the textual metaphors replete within genomic discourse, these writers have illuminated the ethical, cultural, social, and political ramifications of genomic research, attuning readers to postgenomic discourses of race and power. At the same time, Larkin contends that literature’s engagement with genomics goes beyond its initial critique to comment self-reflexively on the practices and value of literary studies. Ultimately, she argues that contemporary writers outline a new ethical matrix for reading race in the postgenomic era—and rethinks literary criticism within this new paradigm.
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