By Making Worlds
Professor Chi-ming Yang | Univ. of Pennsylvania
ENGL 2501.401, also offered as: AFRC 2501/GSWS 2501
This course covers key novels, short stories, and essays by the great African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, with a focus on her experiments with genre and gender-bending shape-shifters. Across texts that span her entire career, from the 1960s to 2006, Butler pursued the themes of time travel, slavery, biotechnology, ecological catastrophe, and urban survival. Novels will include selections from her Patternist, Xenogenesis, and Parable series, as well as the neo-slave narrative Kindred, the graphic novel Kindred, and her vampire novel Fledgling. Texts will be situated within the scholarly fields of Afrofuturism, Black speculative fiction, Black feminisms, animal studies, and climate fiction.
Below is a list of required readings.
Science Fiction and Octavia Butler, English (cross-listed with: Africana Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies)
By Making Worlds
Professor Chi-ming Yang | Univ. of Pennsylvania
ENGL 2501.401, also offered as: AFRC 2501/GSWS 2501
This course covers key novels, short stories, and essays by the great African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, with a focus on her experiments with genre and gender-bending shape-shifters. Across texts that span her entire career, from the 1960s to 2006, Butler pursued the themes of time travel, slavery, biotechnology, ecological catastrophe, and urban survival. Novels will include selections from her Patternist, Xenogenesis, and Parable series, as well as the neo-slave narrative Kindred, the graphic novel Kindred, and her vampire novel Fledgling. Texts will be situated within the scholarly fields of Afrofuturism, Black speculative fiction, Black feminisms, animal studies, and climate fiction.
Below is a list of required readings.
Science Fiction and Octavia Butler, English (cross-listed with: Africana Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies)