“I won’t always ask”: Complicating Agency in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling

Authors

  • Florian Bast

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.128

Abstract

This study reads Octavia Butler’s Fledgling“ as a narrative of agency. Critically engaging previous scholarly tendencies to focus solely on the main protagonist’s successful struggle for self-determination, this essay investigates the ways in which Fledgling complicates and irritates simplistic notions of agency, as the novel questions both the possibility and desirability of a high level of agency.

Author Biography

Florian Bast

Florian Bast earned his M.A. in German Studies and American Studies from Leipzig University in 2009. In 2005 and 2006 he took graduate courses at Washington University in St. Louis’s German and English Departments. In 2009 and 2010 he taught courses on American literature both on an introductory and an advanced level at Leipzig University. He is currently working on his PhD project, which investigates different constructions of agency in the novels of Octavia Butler. His academic interests can be broadly summarized as falling between the fields of African American Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and theories of agency, focussing in particular on the neo-slave narrative and the fantastic in African American literature.

Downloads

How to Cite

Bast, Florian. “‘I won’t Always ask’: Complicating Agency in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 11, Mar. 2012, doi:10.5283/copas.128.

Issue

Vol. 11 (2010)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

Most read articles by the same author(s)