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She has her own style in writing her stories. She combines racism and bigotry with true science fiction. Octavia Butler has the skill and frankness to strip away the myths and write about reality and the real problems with the human race and society. She described herself as “a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist always, a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist, and an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” (Charles, 1997:51)文献综述
She is one of the most famous African-American women in this field after getting the Hugo and Nebula awards. Also, she is the first science fiction writer to receive the Mac Authun Foundation Genius Giant in 1995.
1.2 Kindred
As I just mentioned Butler was raised by her mother and grandmother. The experiences of black women struggling to survive influence her youthful reading and writing. Butler told Veronica Mixon in an interview, “Their lives seemed so terrible to me at times-so devoid of joy and reward. I need my fantasies to shield me from their world.” (Veronica, 1979:14).The powerful imaginative impulse that produces Kindred has its first test runs in the escapist fantasies of a child who needs to find or invent alternatives.
This novel describes an African American woman called Dana, who is living in California in 1976, called back to antebellum Maryland when her white ancestor Rufus Weylin finds himself in a life-threatening situation. The pull of the past is irresistible. When she is called back to the past, the “dizziness” comes and once she reaches her destination the “dizziness” vanishes quickly. Moreover, Dana’s very existence depends on her saving Rufus’s life, as well as that of the slave Alice, who is her several times great-grandmother. She can come back to the present only when she is in extreme personal danger, where the past continues to haunt her until the next pull. She is able to rejoin the present forever, delivered but not unscathed, only after two events has been secured: the birth of Hagar-the daughter of Rufus and Alice; and the death of Rufus. At last, she kills Rufus and comes back to present life forever with one arm left.
Through the continual trips between past and present, the novel stages a hovering between event and memory, raw encounter and retelling, reality and textuality, enacting at the level of the story the intellectual tribulations involved in understanding and producing history.来.自/751论|文-网www.751com.cn/
2 Constructivism
2.1 Introduction to Constructivism
The idea of constructivism first comes into the field of sociological theory, and later into literal study. Theories of Bourdieu, Habermas, Beck, Giddens, Foucault, Derrida etc. embody the idea of constructivism. We can get this idea earlier from Emile Durkhein and Max Weber. Dukhein defines social facts as the social construction making by human being activities, and lays stress on the importance of social rules. While Weber emphasizes human’s ability to endow meanings to the world. “Meaning” becomes one of the most important concepts in Weber Theory. Meaning exists in understanding and explanation as the social facts themselves are the production of social activities. Understanding is the main way of social science, and explanation is the important way of understanding. Both of them add human’s subjective initiative, so the relationship between explaining facts and facts themselves is not liner and causal. The meaning of the world is constructed in understanding and explanation. Most people who believe constructivism agree Weber, especially those people who do literal research.