I don’t think I’ll post my entire final project online, but here is the first six pages or so (still perhaps a bit rough too) to give readers of Inquiry and Intention a little taste of my final project for 726:

A Rhetoric of Diversity and Change:

Re-visioning Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis and Earth Seed

Lately, I’m into circuitry/ What it means to be/ made of you but not enough for you.

— Tori Amos

We are what we imagine.  Our very existence consists in our imaginations of ourselves.

- N. Scot Momaday

Surely there is no more profound way in which humanity imagines itself than through its stories and philosophies, its visions and fictions. Perhaps it is due to its power to imagine humanity that of all so-called “genre” fiction, Science Fiction (SciFi) or, in particular, dystopian SciFi is the one “genre” most likely to “cross-over” and be considered Literature. For example, consider these dystopian SciFi narratives said to “transcend” the genre to be literary classics: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), and Fredrik Pohl’s and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1952). And because of this likelihood to cross-over and be taken “seriously,” it is no surprise, really, that SciFi dystopia is a genre dominated by white male writers—please note that Bradbury, Heinlein, Huxley, Orwell, Pohl and Kornbluth are all white males. Thus, as a black female Octavia E. Butler already stands out in the world of SciFi. However, Butler stands out for more than just her gender and the color of her skin: her work is very strong in what we may call depth and theory. More precisely, not only does it cross-over to Literature, we may say that Butler’s work, and the Xenogenesis trilogy and the Earthseed duology in particular, traces then colors a full-blown feminist theory of rhetoric. This theory includes many elements familiar to feminist rhetoricians, including definitions of Rhetoric and Feminism, and an account of exigence, identity and identification, agency and autonomy, while deliberating various rhetorical options.

Theory from Literature?

Can theory be gleaned from dystopian fiction? Does Xenogenesis and Earth Seed really have the content to be held up as a philosophy of discourse? If we consider the views of Sally Miller Gearhart among others, we see that it surely can. Feminist Rhetorical Theories reports, “Gearhart believes that speculative or utopian fiction provides an opportunity for women to experiment with alternative conceptions of themselves and their place in the universe; thus, fantasy is ‘one of the first steps in political action’”(Foss, Foss and Griffin 261). Thus, these narratives provide the foundation of action, the intention for action, and the theories of reality that will shape and guide that action.

In creating these narratives that the writer creates a projection of society. And just as we may readily see our own faults projected on another, we are thus better able to critique our own society by becoming involved in the projection of society provided by dystopian and utopian narratives. In Butler’s case, the projections of society provided in Xenogenesis and Earthseed are ones with feminist lessons about the power of rhetoric, worlds in which feminist rhetorical practices are conjectured, meditated, and weighed.

One way to think about novels is as philosophical discussions about competing ideas and/or interests, but that is only half the story as these discussions ultimately serve a rhetorical purposes. Novels are rhetoric about the nature of reality, especially dystopian novels as they employ the psychological principle of projection to help us think critically about our real world society. For example, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) could be described as a philosophical discussion about the conflicts between our need to maintain order and ensure our own safety and our desire to for liberty and individuality. But ultimately, this philosophical discussion serves the rhetorical message of the book: education, empathy, the ability to have a hopeful vision of the future, and love are the keys to freedom and civilization, not governmental, revolutionary, or societal force. This point is made at the end of the novel when antihero protagonist, Alex, changes and grows for the better due to the development of his inner life:

Perhaps that was it, I kept thinking. Perhaps I was getting too old for the sort of jeezny I had been leading, brothers. I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And there was old Felix M. with his Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. And there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age, then. But what was I going to do?

Walking in the dark chill bastards of winter streets after ittying off from

this and coffee mesto, I kept viddying like visions, like these cartoons in gazettas. There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa all welcoming and greeting like loving. But I could not viddy her all horrowshow, brothers, I could not think who it might be. But I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the other room next to this room where the fire was burning and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted, and now it all tied up, that picture scissored out of the gazetta and meeting old Pete like that. For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son. Yes yes yes, brothers, my son. And now felt this bolshy big hollow inside my plot, feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up. (189-90)

Herein we see that despite the unimaginativeness and naivety of his patriarchal vision of domestic utopia, the antihero has made the connection between what he has learned and himself and this connection has changed him and fostered empathy, hope, and love. Thus we may talk about Burgess as a social theorist and a rhetorician and analyze the rhetorical and theoretical moves he makes in Clockwork. Likewise, we may think of the Xenogenesis trilogy as an extended philosophical discussion about nature versus nurture and the conflicting interests of individual autonomy and social collectivism, but ultimately these discussions serve the rhetorical purpose arguing for the enfoldment of diversity as necessary to survival and the power of rhetoric to shape society and thus reality.

Finally, when considering the question of whether or not we can really take Literature seriously as theory, rhetorical or otherwise, it must be noted that a defining characteristic of postmodernism seems to be the belief that theory can be drawn from almost any narrative creation. To corroborate this, one merely need jaunt to the nearest Barnes and Noble’s Philosophy section and witness such book titles as Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All; The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real; Star Wars and Philosophy; The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy; Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts; even Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book About Everything and Nothing; Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale; The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am; Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong?; and my personal favorite, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (Amazon).

The method employed in this study to unpack Butler’s narratives as rhetorical theory is a process of critical re-visioning modeled after the Adrienne Rich inspired work of Karen Foss, Sonja Foss, and Cindy Griffin in Feminist Rhetorical Theories, in which works by Gloria Anzuldua, Mary Daly, Sally Miller Gearhart, Starhawk, and Trihn T. Mihn-ha among others are mined and related to traditional rhetorical methods in order to “re-vision rhetoric and encourage scholars to rethink traditional constructs from new perspectives” (Foss et al 1). As Patricia Sullivan boils-it-down, feminist re-vision “in composition involves the reinterpretation of the extant literature” (41).

In this study, re-visioning specifically means the use of the feminist approach of mining the text with various theories (including gender theory of course) to reveal deep connections and patterns. As this study mines Butler’s texts using multiple modes, it hopes to raise these texts from the dark waters of genre expectations and entrenched vocabularies about what theory is and thus change their light, turn them upside-down and inside-out and merge them with the whirlpools, currents, and tidal waves that emerge from “radically open” study.

In essence, re-visioning as practiced in this study is a process of de-familiarizing the text that is really no different in spirit than the process of “Writing Off the Subject” recommended by Richard Hugo to creative writing students in The Triggering Town so that the subjects of their poems might be “generated or discovered in the poem during the writing” (4). Similarly, one of the most profound rhetorical boons of dystopian narratives is their ability to create societies and/or communities that are unfamiliar to us just enough that they can reveal problems in our “real world” societies and communities that we may have been refusing to see. That is, they reveal the subject we weren’t looking for during the writing/reading of the narrative. This might also remind us of the psychological principle of projection in which individuals see unsavory aspects of their own personalities as belonging to others, but not to themselves; thus we see that we must de-familiarize not only our societies but ourselves to make “objective” critiques. And so with this string of connections from re-visioning to creative writing to dystopian narratives to psychology, we see the incredible power, functionality, and concrete reality of the mining and de-familiarizing that are the core of this study’s practice of feminist re-vision, and we also a see in microcosm an example of feminist multi-modal methodology at play.

The purpose and method of this study thus legitimized and explicated, we now turn to overview the narratives before harvesting some of the rhetorical theory with which Xenogenesis and Earth Seed are so ripe.