This essay’s primarily focus is on the common discourse about the persisting effects of the past in the present in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale(1985)and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979).These novels are the testimonies of the protagonists Offred and Dana who shares their experience of traumatic violence and oppression. Dana, with her ability to time travel, will see her present time in clearer light as she experiences the life of a slave on an antebellum plantation. Offred, the Handmaiden owned by the totalitarian regime Gilead, portrays her contemporary life in parallel to remembering her former and thus describing Gilead’s increasing authority. Based on different theorists and concepts in the field of cultural memory studies, this essay examines the tension between memory and history, the distantness towards the past and the problematics with representations of traumatic events. As I argue that the voices of Dana and Offred calls attention to the importance of perspective and of sharing stories, they are also an act of hope, therapy and resistance; an act that also make possible a critique of the processes of the production of historical knowledge.

This thesis uses the observations of Nancy J. Peterson on historical wounds as a springboard to discuss Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and its use of both white and black characters to reexamine the origins of the historical wounds and why they are so difficult to deal with even today. Other scholarly works will be used to further investigate the importance of each character in the story and what they mean to the wound itself. Specifically, Dana is analyzed alongside the other main characters: Rufus, Alice, and Kevin. Though Dana’s relationships with these characters, Kindred’s version of the past can be examined in order to determine why the past is so difficult to overcome and what the novel does to come to an understanding or reconciliation with it. This, in turn, allows for the present to be compared to Butler’s representation of the past as a way of reexamining history.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-103).

Prior to the 1960s and 1970s most studies of time undertaken in the West treated it as an objective phenomenon, devoid of ideological inscriptions. Second Wave feminists challenged this view, arguing that time is not neutral but one of the mechanisms used by patriarchal cultures to subjugate women. The argument was that temporal modes, like everything else in patriarchal reality, had been gendered. Linear time was masculine because it was associated with the male-dominated public domain in which science, commerce and production took place. The natural world, mysticism, the private domain, domesticity and women were relegated to a cyclical temporality that was gendered feminine. In her paper “Women’s Time” Julia Kristeva suggests that three generations of feminism can be identified according to the attitude each takes to time. I use her hypothesis as a framework in order to examine the positions regarding time taken up by various feminist groups during the Second Wave. I identify liberal and socialist feminisms with Kristeva’s first generation because they criticised the fact that women had been left out of linear time and the public domain and demanded that women be reinserted into linear time. I argue that Kristeva’s second generation is represented by cultural feminists of the Second Wave who recognised an alternative women’s time and suggested that women celebrate their connection with it, defying the authority of patrilinear time to dismiss “women’s experiences”. I then propose that the perspective of Kristeva’s third generation may be identified in the work of six authors of feminist speculative fiction who were writing during the Second Wave; this perspective entails a synthesis of the two previous opposing viewpoints. This can be identified in these novels because the female protagonists are first empowered through their access to an alternative (“feminine”) temporal space that subverts the authority of patriarchal culture embedded in linear time and then they move back into patrilinear time, claiming active roles and challenging patriarchal ideology. In this thesis I thus focus on the feminist examination of time during the Second Wave and consider how it was reflected in selected works of feminist speculative fiction written at the time. The authors discussed are Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, Tanith Lee and Sheri Tepper. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / English / unrestricted

No description available.

No description available.

Ce mémoire explore les notions de race et d’identité féminine à travers le récit afro-futuriste Wild Seed d’Octavia Butler. Décrit comme le nouveau genre de la ‘fiction spéculative’ par les théoriciens universitaires, l’afro-futurisme joint le spéculatif au réalisme afin d’explorer les conjonctions entre les diasporas africaines, l’écriture africaine américaine et les technologies modernes. Cette thèse propose une analyse critique et théorique du roman Wild Seed d’Octavia Butler, en se concentrant particulièrement sur ses divers concepts et ses allégories historiques. Plutôt que d’ignorer le rôle que jouent les notions de race et d’identité dans la science-fiction, Butler les met en avant dans le roman Wild Seed et les questionne en adressant des sujets tels que l’après-colonisation, la tyrannie intime, l’hybridité, la différence, l’altérité, et l’identité. Dans le premier chapitre, j’examinerais tout particulièrement l’influence de la domination de la colonisation patriarcale occidental et l’occidentalisation des africains-américains. Puis, à travers les thèmes du trauma intergénérationnel lié à l’esclavage et de l'objectification des corps noirs qui apparaissent dans le texte, j’analyserais les contradictions présentent dans la lutte des Noirs pour la liberté, la race, et l’incarnation raciale. Le second chapitre explorera les différentes formes de résistance, dramatisées à travers le personnage d’Anyanwu, ainsi que l’utilisation des notions d’espace et de temporalité comme techniques pour comprendre et associer ensemble les problèmes d’incarnation et d’identité des genres: afin de survivre à la domination et au pouvoir perpétrés par la société patriarcale de Doro, Anyanwu doit résister, redéfinir, et reconquérir son identité. / This thesis explores the notions of race and female identity through Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist narrative Wild Seed. Described as a new genre of ‘speculative fiction’ by scholars, Afrofuturism converges speculative and realist modes in order to explore conjunctions between African diasporas, African American writing, and modern technologies. This thesis provides a theoretical and critical analysis of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, with a particular focus on its various concepts and historical allegories. The novel Wild Seed addresses such topics as post-colonialization, intimate tyranny, hybridity, difference, otherness, and identity, questioning and foregrounding the role race and identity plays in science fiction. In the first Chapter, I will specifically examine the influence of dominant patriarchal Western colonization and its Westernization of African Americans. Then I will analyze the contradictions within the black struggle for freedom, race, and racialized embodiment through the themes of the intergenerational trauma of slavery and the objectification of black bodies found in the text. The second chapter will explore the different forms of resistance dramatized through Anyanwu’s character, as well as the use of space and temporality as a process to understand and connect the issues of embodiment and gender identity: Anyanwu has to resist, redefine, and reclaim her identity in order to survive the domination and power of Doro’s future patriarchal and biogenetically altered society.

The project deals with artificial neural networks. After designing and debugging the test data set and the training sample set, we created a multilayer perceptron network in the Neural NetworkToolbox (NNT) of Matlab. When creating networks, we used different training algorithms and algorithms improving the generalization of the network. When creating a radial basis network, we did not use the NNT, but a specific source code in Matlab was written. Functionality of neural networks was tested on simple training and testing patterns. Realistic training data were obtained by the simulation of twelve monoconic antennas operating in the frequency range from 2 to 6 GHz. Antennas were located inside a mathematical model of Octavia II. Using CST simulations, electromagnetic fields in a car were obtained. Trained networks are described by regressive characteristics andthe mean square error of training. Algorithms improving generalization are applied on the created and trained networks. The performance of individual networks is mutually compared.

This essay considers the interplay between character narrators, the implied author, and the authorial audience in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents. The aim of the study was to investigate how narrators, the implied author, and readers position themselves in relation to each other and in relation to the novel’s ethical dimensions. The theoretical framework is based on James Phelan’s theories on the rhetorical and ethical aspects of fiction. The essay argues that the implied author’s communication to the authorial audience is one of the reasons that the novel, like its prequel Parable of the Sower, often succeeds to function as warnings to the audience of dangers ahead. This is especially true regarding one of the implied author’s most consistent messages to the audience throughout the Parable novels: every choice has consequences, and those consequences need to be considered when we decide how to act and react in different circumstances, both as individuals and as a society.

No description available.