Literature and the Political Imagination English 1102 English

Literature and the Political Imagination English 1102

English 1102 Welcome! We’ll get started in a few minutes. Please have your essay draft ready. Please open the following: Handouts: Peer Edit Sheet Individual World Building Exercise Connecting the Parts You may wish to review citation and explication/close reading Today: 1. Parable of the Sower and The Dispossessed 2. Begin Peer Edit in class When you are done revising and polishing Sources Check (after class / on your own)

English 1102 Welcome! We’ll get started in a few minutes. Please have your essay draft ready. Coming Up: Next week is reading week: No Class! Work on your essay Read ahead: Monkey Beach (get halfway+ through) Before next class, watch: In A/V Week by Week: Daniel Heath Justice guest lecture When we return we will discuss More’s Utopia and Plato’s Republic

English 1102 Discuss: Start thinking ahead (three weeks) Individual World Building Exercise Notes due Feb 28, Five minute pitch March 3 Create your own world, and describe your world to the group in under five minutes. Casual / informal presentation Choose a geographic size and scale; Choose rules that limit your world and stick to them. These can be any rules you want, but make them consistent Read the instructions, ask any questions

World building Integrate form and content: When you imagine your ‘good world, ’ or ‘good society, ’ think about how you can bring visual, spatial, and aesthetic elements in line with the culture, politics and values of your world. What’s the relationship between form and culture? Sources: https: //aesthetics. fandom. com/wiki/Solarpunk https: //marvelcinematicuniverse. fandom. com/wiki/Kimoyo_Beads

English 1102 Welcome! We’ll get started in a few minutes. Please have your essay draft ready. Coming Up: Friday Feb 12: Upload draft with sources check to First Essay Folder 2% (you will continue revising after) Friday Feb 26: Final Version of paper! Clearly label your files in First Essay Folder: lastname-Essay 1 -final lastname-Essay 1 -rough-draft-with-source-check Make sure to write Peer Edit at the top of your draft, and add your name and your peer edit partner’s name. eg Writer: your name, Peer Edit Partner: your partner’s name.

Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower (1993) Genres: Speculative Fiction, Afrofuturism, near-future fiction

Octavia Butler 1947 -2006 https: //www. syfy. com/syfywire/sower-of-the-future-octavia-e-butler

The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le. Guin Publication year: 1974 Genres: speculative fiction, “an ambiguous Utopia” Setting: Anarres, Urras, part of the Hainish cycle (far distant future, one of many Hainish worlds, of which Terra is but one)

The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le. Guin (1929 -2018) Wrote 20 novels, over 100 short stories. Wrote children’s fiction, speculative fiction, poetry, literary criticism, translations. White American novelist, father was an anthropologist, writing often influenced by politics and anthropology

The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le. Guin Form: prose fiction POV: Third Person Limited Voice: Shevek. Annaresti physicist who writes the Theory of Simultaneity that allows for the creation of the Ansible Tone: Philosophical, introspective, ethical Plot structure: Shevek seeks to integrate the two worlds, just as he seeks to integrate Sequency and Simultaneity Annaresti are “Dispossessed” in that they need no possessions, and also Shevek is “The Dispossessed” – he chooses to leave his home in the hopes of renewing the Odonian ideal and ‘unbuilding walls’

The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le. Guin Anarcho-syndicalist society Decentralized, coordination but no government No prisons, no police, self-governance Annaresti are interdependent yet autonomous Decision making by consensus (syndicates), integrating input of everyone in group, the social organism is greater than sum of its parts

Parable of the Sower (1993) Publication year: 1993 Genres: speculative fiction, near-future fiction, Afrofuturism, visionary fiction, dystopian fiction Setting: West Coast US, mainly California and Oregon, 2024 -2027

Parable of the Sower (1993) Form: prose fiction, some poetry, journal, parts of sacred text Lauren composes POV: First Person Limited Voice: Lauren Oya Olamina Black American teenage girl with hyperempathy; family killed when gated community is destroyed Founder of Earthseed Tone: fiercely purposeful, straightforward and blunt narrative voice, colloquial style, journal

Parable of the Sower (1993) Lauren Olamina creates Earthseed: “All that you touch, you change,

Solo writing: Arguably, Butler’s Parable both predicts and generates the future. It describes ecological, social, and political crises that the author extrapolated into the future from conditions in her time. It has been described as prescient. At the same time, Butler’s work, and Earthseed, have encouraged a generation of younger writers to write themselves, their loved ones, their bodies, speech, cultures, back into the present and the future, when fiction had until recently erased them. Dreaming themselves into the future in turn allows people erased or distorted by the dominant culture to know themselves and to organize for the world they want, a world of dignity for all. Imagine a world that was free of the forms of structural oppression that are in our world. Who would you be? Who would your community be? What would you look like? What clothes would you wear? What would your home look like? How would you organize your days? What would your superpower be? How would you use your gifts for the good of all?

The Power of Imagination “We are in an imagination battle” - amb

Octavia’s Brood (2014) inspired by Octavia Butler, author of Parable of the Sower and Lilith’s Brood Genres: Speculative Fiction, Afrofuturism, Visionary Fiction

Octavia’s Brood (2014) inspired by Octavia Butler, author of Parable of the Sower and Lilith’s Brood adrienne maree brown: “we are in an imagination battle”

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017) emergence is: fractal adaptive interdependent and decentralized non-linear and iterative resilient and transformative creating more possibility, life giving (brown 43)

Octavia’s Brood (2014) inspired by Octavia Butler, author of Parable of the Sower and Lilith’s Brood Can you imagine a culture in which stillness was valued, and ‘productivity’ was not a thing? How did your body feel when you read the letter from the future? If you could write yourself a letter from the future using ‘we’ not ‘I’ what would you want ‘we’ to have achieved?

Five minutes quiet solo writing: Hope in The Dispossessed and Parable of the Sower What in each story inspires you to feel hopeful? The Dispossessed is hopeful, and so is Parable of the Sower What inspires you in each book? What is one strategy that Lauren Olamina uses to survive in her world, and how might it apply to our world today? If you could live on Anarres and have total freedom to use your days however you wanted, and have all of your needs for housing, food, clothing, met, and everyone you know and care about also had all of their needs met, and you could do anything with your days that you wish, have any career that suited your gifts and interest, what would you do? who would you be? Is this difficult to imagine? Why? Which world would you rather live in, Anarres or Lauren’s Earth? Why?

Breakouts: The Dispossessed and Parable of the Sower What in each story inspires you to feel hopeful? The Dispossessed is Utopian and hopeful. It can inspire us to create worlds like Anarres. to believe they are possible Parable of the Sower is also hopeful, even though it is a dystopia Utopia and dystopia: each contains elements of the other What inspires you in each book? collect evidence with page numbers prepare to add to the white board when we return If quote is longer than a few words or a line, you can use ellipses (…) to show the start and end of longer quotes, and cut out the middle, so you don’t have to type the whole thing

What inspires you to feel hope in each text? The Dispossessed HOPE Parable of the Sower

Octavia’s Brood (2014) inspired by Octavia Butler, author of Parable of the Sower and Lilith’s Brood How did the community decide to handle the conflict? How does this differ from the ways conflict is typically handled in western culture? How might this be considered ‘visionary fiction’? How might you feel if you were in their shoes? What are the pros and cons of approaching conflict in this way?

Peer Edit instructions • Swap draft, read fully front to back in silence • Check each step of Peer Edit Sheet. Note comments on the draft. • Do not rewrite: comment and suggest (no track changes) • Swap back and explain: Sandwiching!

Peer Edit instructions • Swap back and explain: Sandwiching! • Things that work • Areas that could be stronger: specific, constructive, detailed • Something you like! Save something good for the end.

English 1099 When you complete your peer edit, then work on revision, and when your revision is complete, work on your own Sources Check Draft: 1. Colour code all claims and all content that needs a source 2. Check that each claim and / or all info that needs a source has a parenthetical citation with sourcing 3. Check that each matches a works cited entry. You can have more than one in text citation per WC entry. When complete, upload your Rough Draft with Source Check to the Short Essay folder along with your final version.