Microbial Zoopoetics in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark

Author(s)

  • Sophia Booth Magnone UC Santa Cruz Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9668

Abstract

This paper reads Octavia Butler’s 1984 novel Clay’s Ark as a speculative handbook for living collaboratively in a more-than-human world. Drawing on Aaron Moe’s theory of zoopoetics, as well as emerging research on the effects of the human microbiome on health, behavior, and personality, I consider how the novel’s “villain,” an infectious microbe, might be not just a germ but an author, writing difference into the text of the human species. Depicting this interspecies relationship as both troubling and productive, Butler suggests the urgent need for humans to construct responsible and mutually beneficial forms of collaboration with their nonhuman neighbors of all sorts.

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Author Biography

  • Sophia Booth Magnone, UC Santa Cruz

    Sophia Booth Magnone is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, The Speculative Agency of the Nonhuman: Animal, Object, and Posthuman Worldings, examines alternative expressions of agency, gender, species, and personhood in nineteenth- and twentieth-century speculative fiction.

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Published

2016-03-20

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

“Microbial Zoopoetics in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark”. 2016. Humanimalia 7 (2): 109-30. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9668.