This will be the FINAL due date change for Essay #2: Friday, 11/17, 11:00pm on Canvas.
Plan for the Day
- The intentional fallacy: a text’s meaning does NOT come ONLY from the author’s (or director’s or creator’s) intended meaning; therefore, the author is not the sole or final arbiter of what a text means.
- American Cultural Analysis
- Critique: What does Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) have to do with a post-nuclear war world?
- Celebrating Ignorance
- Gender Analysis
- Octavia Butler’s Dawn (Parts III & IV)
Let’s jump back to November 1st’s page to discuss the American Cultural and (possibly) Gender Analysis stuff (might be better for The Dispossessed). I’m still trying to stimulate your thinking for Essay #2. Maybe we can discuss synthesizing quotations, which tonight’s editing class will cover.
Octavia Butler’s Dawn
As you read Dawn, consider these questions:
- What makes us a technology? Are we natural?
- Is there a comment about deep-seated beliefs being part of our DNA?
- Why was Lilith chosen to lead this group of humans?
Part III: Nursery
- p. 121: “Lilith had asked for color and Nikanj had found someone who could teach it how to induce the ship to produce color.”
- p. 137: Tate asks Lilith if the Oankali are “Russians.”
- pp. 138-139: “Anthropology….It seemed to me that my cultures–ours–was running headlong over a cliff….It was the cultures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that counted.”
- hegemony
- p. 153: “So far she had not Awakened a single voluntary vegetarian.”
- Politics of meat consumption
- p. 161: Nikanj to Joseph–“A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination.”
- p. 163: “biochemical changes”: alien steroids.
- p. 177: “Nikanj stimulates nerves directly, and we remember or create experiences to suit the sensations.”
- p. 183: Tate tells Lilith–“They don’t want reason or logic or your hopes or expectations. They want Moses or somebody to come lead then into lives they can understand.”
- Sound familiar? I have my truth, so don’t talk to me about facts…
- p. 190: “Are you really human?”
- p. 196: “Different is dangerous.”
- p. 203: “Peter began to think, he apparently decided he had been humiliated and enslaved….His humanity was profaned. His manhood was taken away.”
Part IV: The Training Floor
That title suggests an industrial space where workers learn how to produce widgets and things. What might “The Training Grounds” signify?
- p. 212: “There’s no way out for them except the way we offer.”
- “This is the way” (The Mandalorian moral code)
- p. 216: “[Curt]’s nt in control even of what his own body does and feels. He’s taken like a woman….Someone else is pushing all his buttons. He can’t let them get away with that.
- pp. 219: “Two men and a woman took their alloted tools and vanished into the forest. They did not really know enough to be on their own, but they were gone. Their ooloi did not go after them.”
- Not all those awakened were named in the novel.
- Think of those who ran as adolescents.
- p. 229: Leah–“I don’t see how all this could be part of a ship, but whatever it is, wherever it is, we’re going to explore it and figure it out. We’ll know soon.”
- p. 233: Lilith’s eidetic memory
- “Every Oankali change she had told them about had diminished her credibility with them.”
- She wasn’t one of them.
- Could she ever have been one of them? would she ever have been a legitimate leader?
- p. 241: “[Nikanj] had helped set up a human experiment. One of the humans had been lost. What did it feel?”
- p. 243: Kahguyaht to Tate–“If you manage to use your machete on anyone, you’ll lose Earth….We’re giving you the thing you want most: Freedom and a return home.”
- Let’s define freedom again.
- As an American value, we talk about it quite a bit, but, of course, there are contradictions.
- “Freedom’s not something you fight for
It’s just the key that locks us in
And what did your father die for
A cardboard house with fake wood trim
Guess you showed him
—emmet swimming “Fake Wood Trim” - “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”
—Janis Joplin “Me & Bobby McGee” (written by Roger Miller)
- p. 253: “They didn’t lie often to humans because their sensory language had left them with no habit of lying–only withholding information, refusing contact…..Humans, on the other hand, lied easily and often.”
- Someone once told me, “I won’t ever lie to you. I can’t always tell you everything, but I won’t lie to you.”
- That person is probably the biggest liar I’ve ever met.
- p. 257: “She wanted to stay with human beings even though for a time, she did not love them.”
- p. 263: Nikanj to Lilith–“We will moderate your hierarchal problems and you will lessen our physical limitations Our children won’t destroy themselves in a war.”
- p. 264: “A few fertile people might slip through and find one another. Perhaps. Learn and run!“
Next Week
We’ll cover Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed next week on Monday and Wednesday. Then, we won’t have class until Wednesday, 11/29. We will not meet as a class on the Mondays right before (11/20) and right after (11/27) Thanksgiving.