<p>Terry Pratchett, writer of humorous, satirical fantasy, is very popular in Britain. His Discworld series, which encompasses over 30 novels, has witches as protagonists in one of the major sub-series, currently covering eight novels. His first “witch” novel, Equal Rites, in which he pits organised, misogynist wizards against disorganised witches, led him to being accused of feminist writing. This work investigates this claim by first outlining the development of the historical witch stereotype or discourse and how that relates to the modern, feminist views of witches. Then Pratchett’s treatment of his major witch characters is examined and analysed in terms of feminist and poststructuralist literary theory. It appears that, while giving the impression of supporting feminism and the feminist views of witches,</p><p>Pratchett’s witches actually reinforce the patriarchal view of women.</p>

Terry Pratchett, writer of humorous, satirical fantasy, is very popular in Britain. His Discworld series, which encompasses over 30 novels, has witches as protagonists in one of the major sub-series, currently covering eight novels. His first “witch” novel, Equal Rites, in which he pits organised, misogynist wizards against disorganised witches, led him to being accused of feminist writing. This work investigates this claim by first outlining the development of the historical witch stereotype or discourse and how that relates to the modern, feminist views of witches. Then Pratchett’s treatment of his major witch characters is examined and analysed in terms of feminist and poststructuralist literary theory. It appears that, while giving the impression of supporting feminism and the feminist views of witches, Pratchett’s witches actually reinforce the patriarchal view of women.

<p>This novel began as a short story collection exploring aspects of blackness that dealt with homosexuality, family dynamics, violence, Christianity and societal constructs. The first draft was titled <i>Innerworkings</i>. My goal was to show how the actions or inactions of others can easily affect someone else’s life by focusing on each character individually before their story intertwined without another’s. This current thesis manuscript steams from my experience of talking to family members and peers, each with a different option about how the topics stated should be handled. Most of the conversations left me with more questions and feelings of guilt or questioning what my life looks like vs what it should look like. With the current thesis manuscript, I strive to find a way to bring up a new way to handle discussions where spiritually and unspiritual topics can be handled respectfully. </p> <p> </p> <p>Reading Jesmyn Ward’s <i>Sing, Unburied Sing</i> and <i>Salvage the Bones</i> allowed me to see how a story could play out when each character is given their individual spotlight while also giving the reader insight to how they view the other characters. The work here is also influenced by Tomi Adeyemi’s novel <i>Children of Blood and Bone </i>and Marlon James’s <i>Black Leopard, Red Wolf</i> that showcased how important maps and character charts were in helping the readers understand the world and plot by giving them insight before they cracked open the first chapter. With time, I hope to be able to integrate maps and family tree dynamics into the novel so that The Community can be properly showcased as a character and its changes over time. </p>

Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene suggests a world in which humans and non-humans are inextricably entangled, a world in which global ecological devastation demands new ways of relating across disciplines and across differences, a world in which strategic coalitions across disciplines—fluid transdisciplinary coalitions—are badly needed. Haraway suggests sympoiesis, or making-with, as a move toward response-ability. In this project, I embrace the rich fabric of Narrative Inquiry in English Education and knit a diffractive, transdisciplinary reading of current debates in reading/literacy studies, composing speculative fiction as I compose my own approaches to teaching and research and figure a sympoietic pedagogy.

This dissertation examines end-of-world and posthumanist themes in speculative fiction and theory through the concept of “world unmaking.” Reading for world unmaking in three popular U.S. works of speculative fiction — Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1974), Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), and N. K. Jemisin’s the Broken Earth Trilogy (2015-17) — it explores how varying representations of “the end” are deployed to destabilize normative ideals of the human and the world that undergird conventional notions of the subject under late liberal humanism. While much attention has been paid to world building and how inherent logics cohere within fictional worlds, world unmaking asks how representations of world disorder, instability, and breakdown might hold important insights for narrating and navigating disordered worlds. Contemporary posthumanist critical theorists increasingly vie for speculative practices that disrupt the inherited onto-epistemologies of liberal humanisms and settler colonialisms. In particular, new materialists and speculative realists argue urgent work must be done to expand thought beyond naturalized and neutralized discourses that subtend conventional versions of reality, especially as the pressures of multiple ecological and geopolitical crises bear down unequally upon the lives of both humans and nonhumans on a shared planet Earth. The rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic, eco-catastrophe, and survival narratives in recent decades suggests a growing appetite for speculative imaginings of the end. While some representations of the end of the world serve as an escape from the intersecting crises of the environment, the resurgence of right-wing politics and white supremacy, and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism, this dissertation illustrates the importance of attending to speculative imaginings that use the end-of-the-world conceit to destabilize dominant culture and pose more expansive questions about what it means to be human. / Graduate / 2022-04-19

TITLE: THE SUNKEN COUNTRY & OTHER STORIESMAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Rebekah Frumkin The Sunken Country & Other Stories collects five works that place personal tales of alienation, repression, isolation, obsession, and romance and broader themes of dramatic shifts in the workings of culture and environment under a microscope and vivisect them with tools gathered from the New Weird tradition

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In a time of Global Pandemic, massive social justice demonstrations, and concerning political shifts, reality feels inaccessible and at times even unreal. With quarantine and social distance as the new norm, our human connections are abstract and digitized. My thesis will be a collection of short fiction that seeks to employ methods of the speculative genre and alternative narrative structure to explore our shifting understanding of humanity and connectedness. The introduction to this collection will lay out the process through which speculative realities better define our own.

An Earth of Foxes: A Novel opens in 2073 and explores the realities of daily life if environmental change unfolds in particular, ever-more-likely ways—as well as the kind of collaborative action that will be required to survive. In North Dakota, a woman struggles with being an outsider and the only fertile woman in a former fracking town; in Idaho a girl weighs whether or not to run away from the militia that’s raised her; in Arkansas a young woman contemplates futility as her town erodes. Climate change is not a catastrophe or an apocalypse. It doesn’t end, there can be no clearly defined after. Heat and storms and earthquakes become an invisible routine. People defend what they have or set out from one corner of the country to another, hoping for better. A work of speculative climate fiction, An Earth of Foxes attempts to marry the extrapolation of science fiction with literary fiction’s empathy to the relationships and choices of individuals. The book considers complicity, futility, and sacrifice as climate change unravels with slow and intimate violence, a problem that cannot be solved by some single character’s hero journey but demands collective action.

When the body is observed through a certain combination of technologies, there can be subversive politics to doing anything at all. The nature of media and biopolitics has permitted for a set of systems aimed at total control of the human body; a power which can permeate all facets of life. This thesis is a collection of essays which argues that speculative fiction contains multitudes of approaches to biopolitical discourse, permitting the reader of the text to approach politics from their own set of experiences, but not allowing the political to be ignored. These chapters contain three separate but interrelated arguments regarding the nature of power: “Law, Technology, and the Body,” “Weaponized Media,” and “The Subversive Politics of Doing Anything at All.” This thesis creates working definitions of critical or political concepts which the chapters engage, defining terms such as speculative fiction, formalism, and biopolitics. The texts which these chapters primarily rely upon to convey examples of the visibility of these concepts—the work of Margaret Atwood and David Foster Wallace—will also be explored in these pages, prescribing specific interpretations of their plots and suggesting possible readings of the way the narratives describe technologies. The first chapter, “Law, Technology, and the Body,” posits that computational metaphors for humans are used to enforce power, particularly through the construction of law, which is prominent in works of speculative fiction. This chapter will use biopolitical theory as well as formalist readings to approach the texts: it begins by explaining the biopolitical approach to the texts which permits for such readings, then elaborates upon law, power structures, and technology which affect the body within Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. It ultimately concludes by suggesting that these structures will be visible within all narratives, but particularly prominent in speculative fiction due to the way speculative fiction engages with and responds to the technologies of the real world. The second chapter, “Weaponized Media,” shows that the trope of weaponized media is a compelling lens through which to approach text and an apt metaphor for the relationship between art and power, elucidating its prominence within speculative fiction. This argument relies primarily upon structuralism, linguistic theory, Russian formalism, and conflict theory to explain the highly-politicized use of weapons in these texts. Beginning with a survey of examples of this trope in speculative fiction, particularly within David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the chapter concludes by reflecting upon the biopolitical structures which contribute to and are reflected by this trope. The final chapter, “The Subversive Politics of Doing Anything at All,” is a cumulation of the prior arguments. Supporting the chapter’s titular thesis, Russian formalism, media theory, and the surveillance and race theory of Simone Browne are used as central tenets to support this argument’s progression. This chapter argues that media propagates norms, that all things are now media. The consequences that follow from the nature of media entail that due to a hyper-connected world and the conflation of fear and terrorism, almost all things can be considered outside the norm—that doing almost anything at all is viewed as subversive by some, particularly by normative structures and governments. Speculative fiction questions these structures, specifically asking the reader to consider the political structures inherent in every action that they might commit to.