Parable of the sower, Article analysis

AMROUCHE Anias Tiziri

E22206721

LLCER Anglais TD 1

Article : Diversity, Change, violence: Octavia Butler’s Pedagogical Philosophy 

Analysis :

  The article is entitled Diversity, change, violence: Octavia Butler’s Pedagogical Philosophy is written by Sarah Outterson, published by Penn state University Press in 2008 which tackles in 23 pages different aspects of violence change and diversity within Olivia Butler’s novellas by taking into consideration her pedagogical philosophy .

   In this article, it is remarkable how  Butler’s sience fiction work depicts violence in a well determined and persistent way that incldes conflicts, nuclear wars, child abuse, slavery and above all the use of self defense to free from the violent world O.Butler imagines, her characters regularly face or experience considerable,cultural and physical changes to create a specific identity to each in order to survive.

  Another point raised by Sarah Outterson is that Butler employs imaginative concepts like vampires, aliens and telepaths which are mainly used to illustrate the extreme degree of inequality and the vast range of injustice in a violent world, her novels depicts the procedure of growing and finding the world to be violent and scary taking example of Lauren the main character of parable of the sower who faced many obstacles and experienced character development throughout the development of the story.

  Sarah Outterson explores throughout her article by tracing how Olivia Butler links change, diversity and violence in order to show to the public the lie and justifications people give to their violent behaviours and taking Xenogenesis Trilogy and Parable Duo as illustrations.

  To begin with how violence can be dangerous while parenting, the journalist Sarah Outterson chooses Lilith, a character from Xenogenesis Books which is Butler’s illustration of a violent teacher and parent. Lilith was given a mission of teaching, comforting, guiding and parenting but she required power to do so and in order to gain power changing her physical and mental power to enforce her leadership was a must.This character needed to use violence to control, impress and gain respect and give her the capacity to control. Thus, this violence is shown in the second paragraph of the page 436 “The training room” which is a threat of killing between humans but according to Nikanj it is the best way to train in order to survive because the learning process require suffering and teachers must belong to a violent vicious circle in order to defend themselves and teach. However, this ideology and pedagogy according to the journalist is considered as an unsentimental attitude of educating through violence, physical harm and suffering to human’s innate desire when aggression and domination instinctively take over control which makes violence inevitable.

  Outterson presents different critics regarding the utopian work of Olivia Butler in introducing her science-fictional characters by pointing the violence in her novels to flawed villains as mentioned in page 240 L4 “Pre-apocalyptic Communities” and the conflicts she creates within them and argues about the characters that become violent for the sake of surviving and other critics argues about the heroines presented in Butler’s utopian stories that are powerful not to conquer the world but just conquer the notion of tyranny, she does not offer a full version of utopia in her writings but more of a post apocalyptic vision through envisioning a more pessimistic world in order to feel less guilty about ours and she hopes to create a better world without reaching to any kind of physical or mental violence. “Butler argues that everyone and everything, including her utopian-minded search for transgressive communities, is violent. Those in power are never free of controlling structures, and those who commit acts or perpetuate systems that seem violent are themselves within boundary-violation systems such as the ooloi family groups or the Pattern. No one is truly free, and so even when people try to do the right things they cause bad things to happen” added the journalist.

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