"Suspicion Is More Likely To Keep You Alive Than Trust:” Affective Relationships with the Bible in Octavia Butler’s Parables

Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies; Lois Wilson

"Suspicion Is More Likely To Keep You Alive Than Trust:” Affective Relationships with the Bible in Octavia Butler’s Parables

Author(s):

Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (view group) , Lois Wilson

Date:

2021

Group(s):

Biblical Studies, Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies

Subject(s):

Science fiction, Bible, Speculative fiction, Reader-response criticism, Affect (Psychology)

Item Type:

Article

Tag(s):

Octavia E. Butler, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, suspicion, Reception of the Bible, Affect

Permanent URL:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/f3wp-m042

Abstract:

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents provide readers with often radical re- visions and critiques of biblical texts. This article asks how the principal characters’ affective engagements with Scripture vary, and considers the extent to which fiction may “play” with the Bible, despite its authoritative distance. It employs Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s approaches from her 1993 monograph Feminist Revision and the Bible: a hermeneutics of suspicion, a hermeneutics of desire, and a hermeneutics of indeterminacy. Aligning these modes with the affect theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this research finds that the position of a character’s ego (paranoiac versus depressive) affects how they may approach the “lost object” of religious authority. The more the reader is awakened to these different positions, the more they may eventually become comfortable with indeterminacy. Such freedom from a sense of the monologic permits creative engagement with the Bible that reflects recent aims of feminist and womanist theologies.

Notes:

Lois Wilson, “Suspicion Is More Likely To Keep You Alive Than Trust:” Affective Relationships with the Bible in Octavia Butler’s Parables," Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 3.1 (2021): 95–121.

Metadata:

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Status:

Published

Last Updated:

2 years ago

License:

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