Another friend here suggests that I should blog about my thesis. And I will do just that. I hope it makes sense since I'm still trying to form words around this mess of not-fully-formed-ideas in my mind!
Right now I am working on completing the first ten pages, which need to include the following: 1) an introduction to the reason I am interested in studying Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, 2) my definition/understanding of affect and emotion and how and why I am using them for my analysis and 3) outline the argument that I plan to make in the subsequent 40 pages. Believe it or not, #3 is by far the hardest for me to do.
At this stage, I'm almost done with my introduction to why I'm interested in these novels. Basically, I see that issues of subjectivity, technology, and citizenship intersect in interesting ways in the novels. These are three fairly unrelated issues, so I am having to devote a good 4-5 pages explaining their relationship as I see it. The biggest challenge I am having in moving the paper forward is making a strong connection between the way that violence is enacted on the body through technology and "citizenship" in similar ways. It's fairly complicated, but the idea is that the consequences of legal personhood (citizenship) is related to abstracting people through rhetoric and other means, which reduces the real lives of people to their political representation. This abstraction is thus a form of violence on the body and can be a slippery slope to oppression. While technology also has great potential for violence in the novel -- pharmaceutical drugs, in particular, as a form of technology, does violence through inducing defects like hyperempathy syndrome -- because it is absorbed by the body and affects personal agency by reducing clear thinking, etc.
What do these two types of violence have in common? Well, I'm still working that out...I'm not sure right now. Basically, it's a hunch right now, and I have to make a logical argument out of a purely inspired idea. One way that they absolutely interesect is that, in the novels, drugs that do violence to the body also make users either too numb to be engaged with the world around them or make them so crazy that they enact violence as pyromaniacs (one example) and thus, wreck havoc on their communities. I'm starting to think something along the lines of this: technological advances in pharmaceutical drugs rob people of their agency by incapacitating them in a similar way to how legal personhood robs people of their complete-ness/complexity/agency...I don't have the right word for what I mean right there.
Yowzer. I have no idea if any of this is making sense. If it makes sense to you...or, even better, if you have ideas that would make this make sense, please by all means get in touch. Like immediately since this is due Tuesday :)
Right now I am working on completing the first ten pages, which need to include the following: 1) an introduction to the reason I am interested in studying Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, 2) my definition/understanding of affect and emotion and how and why I am using them for my analysis and 3) outline the argument that I plan to make in the subsequent 40 pages. Believe it or not, #3 is by far the hardest for me to do.
At this stage, I'm almost done with my introduction to why I'm interested in these novels. Basically, I see that issues of subjectivity, technology, and citizenship intersect in interesting ways in the novels. These are three fairly unrelated issues, so I am having to devote a good 4-5 pages explaining their relationship as I see it. The biggest challenge I am having in moving the paper forward is making a strong connection between the way that violence is enacted on the body through technology and "citizenship" in similar ways. It's fairly complicated, but the idea is that the consequences of legal personhood (citizenship) is related to abstracting people through rhetoric and other means, which reduces the real lives of people to their political representation. This abstraction is thus a form of violence on the body and can be a slippery slope to oppression. While technology also has great potential for violence in the novel -- pharmaceutical drugs, in particular, as a form of technology, does violence through inducing defects like hyperempathy syndrome -- because it is absorbed by the body and affects personal agency by reducing clear thinking, etc.
What do these two types of violence have in common? Well, I'm still working that out...I'm not sure right now. Basically, it's a hunch right now, and I have to make a logical argument out of a purely inspired idea. One way that they absolutely interesect is that, in the novels, drugs that do violence to the body also make users either too numb to be engaged with the world around them or make them so crazy that they enact violence as pyromaniacs (one example) and thus, wreck havoc on their communities. I'm starting to think something along the lines of this: technological advances in pharmaceutical drugs rob people of their agency by incapacitating them in a similar way to how legal personhood robs people of their complete-ness/complexity/agency...I don't have the right word for what I mean right there.
Yowzer. I have no idea if any of this is making sense. If it makes sense to you...or, even better, if you have ideas that would make this make sense, please by all means get in touch. Like immediately since this is due Tuesday :)
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