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August 04, 2006
NEMLA Panel on Octavia Butler
Shaping the Future of Octavia Butler: Towards Understanding Her Legacy
Call for Papers
Panel Title:
Shaping the Future of Octavia Butler: Towards Understanding Her Legacy
38th Convention,
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 1-4, 2007
Baltimore, MD
The recent, tragic death of Octavia Butler occasions comments about her legacy. A recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant and the Nebula and Hugo awards, and a rare voice in a genre dominated by white men, Butler has drawn much critical attention. This panel seeks to identify and trace Butler's characteristic concerns: the individual and the community, the mobility of identity, the semi-permeable barrier between self and Other, the voice of the liminal, and the nebulous and changing loci of race, gender and sexuality.
Ultimately, the panel will attempt to define the importance of Butler’s oeuvre:
*To what extent did she help to humanize science fiction, to raise questions of humanity in a genre that is often more concerned with plot and theme or the end of humanity altogether?
*How did her voice influence science fiction, African-American literature, “serious” fiction?
*What new possibilities did her work open up in any or all of these genres?
*How did her view of the self influence other writers and/or foreground discussions of the nature of self?
*To what extent did she write from the margins? To what extent bring the margin into the center?
*What new ground did she break, and what lasting effects has she had on other writers and on the various genres within which she worked?
These are preliminary questions, of course, and they rise as well from certain assumptions about the nature of literature and of humanity. Papers that question the validity of these questions as they pertain to the work of Octavia Butler will also be given serious consideration; the panel seeks to open up a discussion rather than deliver a summative judgment. We welcome papers that examine characteristic themes in any work or her opus as a whole.
Please submit 250-500 word abstracts by September 15 to Shari Evans, either as a word attachment to sevans@umassd.edu, or in hard copy to
Shari Evans
Assistant Professor of English
University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth
285 Old Westport Road
North Dartmouth, MA 02747-2300.
For further information on NEMLA and the convention, please see the NEMLA website: www.nemla.org.
Posted by ChrissieMains at August 4, 2006 04:20 PM