Question

I doing a research paper on Kindred my thesis statement is as follow, can you help me locate some resources to help with this?

Details

Dana longs for the equity and acceptance that she has in her world of 1970 in the 1800’s Antebellum South that she is born into through her time travels. This dream is met with several large obstacles, race, gender and lack of education of others.

Answered By: Amanda Roper
Last Updated: Sep 03, 2020     Views: 2329

 

This is a great topic and you have a lot to work with here. To begin, I'm going into our American Literature guide and typing Octavia Butler AND Kindred in the Search Brenau Discovery box. There are several results, one result on the first page, The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in contemporary Black Women's Fiction seems like a great fit for this topic.

For articles I go back to the American Literature LibGuide and click on the yellow articles tab at the top. I'm going to choose a database that will have appropriate resources; let's try Academic Search Complete, Once you click on Academic Search Complete, you'll be asked to login with your Brenau username and password.

I'm going to start out by doing a general search on Kindred and Octavia Butler. In the search bar I type Kindred AND Octavia Butler. This yields 37 results. On the left hand side of the screen is a bar that allows us to limit the search. I clicked on full-text and academic journal. This takes us down to 18 articles, which is a very manageable number!

When I scan the titles I notice that many of the articles discuss time-travel, race, and gender. When you say "lack of education of others," I assume that means racism and prejudice and those topics are discussed as well. Race and gender are both very big topics to address in a research paper. I'd recommend searching for a way to make that thesis statement slightly more specific. For example, if you were to write about Dana's relation to her own body that could embrace race, gender, and the prejudice of others in a more focused way. The article cited below may be useful to you and it is in the results list:

Bast, Florian. "No.": The Narrative Theorizing of Embodied Agency in Octavia Butler's "Kindred." Extrapolation. vol. 53, no. 2, Aug. 2012, pp. 151-181. EBSCOhost, doi:10.3828/extr.2012.8.

This article ties together your idea that 1970's Dana has a difficult time adjusting to the 1800's Antebellum South:

Yaszek, Lisa. "A Grim Fantasy": Remaking American History in Octavia Butler's Kindred." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, vol. 28, no. 4, Summer2003, p. 1053. EBSCOhosthttps://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&authtype=ip,shib&db=a9h&AN=10447972&site=ehost-live&custid=bre1.

Both of those articles are in the search results list using the search terms I used.

The book and two articles should get you started on uncovering some great sources for your paper. Let me know if you'd like more information!

 

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