BLOODCHILD

Octavia E. Butler sold her first novel in 1976, and has subsequently emerged as one of the foremost novelists of her generation with such critically well-received books as Pattermaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay\u27s Ark,Dawn, and Imago. Her short stories appear infrequently, but are well worth the wait. In 1984 she won a Hugo Award for her story Speech Sounds. And in 1985 she won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for the story that follows, Bloodchild, one of the most powerful and disturbing stories of human/alien relations you \u27re ever likely to read, a story in which we are not only subjugated, but damn proud to be so, too. . .

Kindred

https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/commonbook-archive/1000/thumbnail.jp

Willd seed/ Butler

279 hal.; 17 c

Walt Whitman, Jane Bennett, and the Paradox of Antagonistic Sympathy

This essay critically engages ontological, rhetorical, ethical, and political themes pertinent to the concept of “sympathy” as it appears in the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman and Jane Bennett’s writing on him. I suggest that antagonism is immanent in the “ecology of sympathies” that Bennett theorizes, and that this partly explains why one frequently finds antagonistic articulations deeply intertwined with Whitman’s most sympathetic expressions. I propose that we use the paradoxical—even oxymoronic sounding—trope antagonistic sympathy to evoke this immanent relationship between affiliative and antagonistic flows, energies, and conditions for ethical and political cultivation. The concept of antagonistic sympathy helps us better understand Whitman, the ethical and political qualities, pulls, and implications of sympathy, and it enables us to theorize entanglements of sympathy and antagonism in ways that avoid the worst tendencies of each when isolated from the other. Antagonistic sympathy, I argue, is indispensable for radical democratic and ecological transformation in a time of rapidly intensifying planetary ecological catastrophe