Proposal

Final Paper

Literary Texts:
Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Almanac of the Dead Leslie Marmon Silko

Articles:
“The Timeliness of Almanac of the Dead, or a Postmodern Rewriting of Radical Fiction” by Caren Irr
Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison
*I haven’t entirely decided if these are the best articles to use or not.

Question: How do history and prophecy, particularly in science fiction, interact to create our perception of the present? What effect do history and prophecy have on what will actually happen?

Thesis: Those in power determine what our history is, thus maintaining the status quo. That history informs the present and defines all prophecy of the future. Thus, efforts to change the past, as in Lathe of Heaven, fundamentally disrupt the present and future, whereas belief in prophecies, as in Almanac of the Dead, actually reinforces the society that caused the need for them. Therefore, effective change is best achieved through a reimagining of the past rather than forward looking action.

Quotes/ Passages:
“I have had dreams that… that affected the… non-dream world. The real world.”
“Not prophetic dreams. I can’t foresee anything. I simply change things” (Le Guin 11).

“He’s encouraging me… to change reality by dreaming that it’s different” (Le Guin 45).

“That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time- only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream” (Le Guin 71).

“This knowledge [assumptions accepted in the literary community] holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first Africans and then African-Americans in the United States “ (Morrison 5).

“The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination” (Morrison 6).

“It is important to see how inextricable Africanism is or ought to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strategies undertaken to erase its presence from view.”
“…in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse” (Morrison 9).

“…time as ‘we’ know it is an orderly, consistent, sensible, and nonprophetic repetition of an initial totality” (Irr 223).

“Thus, the almanac is simultaneously a record of events (e.g., anniversaries) and a prediction; it occupies a transitive ground between past and future, as well as between English and Spanish, and official and folk religion” (Irr 226).

“However, while European narratives of this event generally attribute all historical agency to Europeans, in Almanac of the Dead as in her previous novel Ceremony, Silko does the opposite; she frames the arrival of the Europeans and the epoch of the Death-Eye Dog with developments in native culture” (Irr 228).

“ On one hand, the concept of an absolute time moving forward in mobile space is tied to the concept of utopian transformation, or a new epoch…” (Irr 234).

“Sacred time is always in the Present” (Silko 136).

“…the past was history and no longer mattered” (Silko 390).

“If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up” (Silko 431).

“What was coming could not be stopped; the people might join or not; the tribal people of North America could come to the aid of the twins and their followers or they could choose not to help. It made no difference because what was coming was relentless and inevitable; it might require five or ten years of great violence and conflict. It might require a hundred years of spirit voices and simple population growth, but the result would be the same: tribal people would retake the Americas; tribal people would retake ancestral land all over the world” (Silko 711-712).