I used Hunter’s one search database as well as JSTOR and google scholar. In order to figure out which journals and peer reviewed articles I could use, I utilized key words from my question to narrow things down which helped significantly. JSTOR and one search was the most helpful and easiest to navigate for me.

Blazan, S. (2022). “Something beyond pain”: Race, gender, and hyperempathy in octavia butler’s parable of the sower. Gender Forum, (82), 34. Retrieved from http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/something-beyond-pain-race-gender-hyperempathy/docview/2764532780/se-2

Caputi, Jane. “Facing Change.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 11, no. 2 (42), 2000, pp. 175–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308439. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.

Chelsea M. Frazier. “Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist Interventions in Environmentalism.” Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, pp. 40–72. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.1.0040. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.

Henderson, Carol E. “FREEDOM TO SELF-CREATE: IDENTITY AND THE POLITICS OF MOVEMENT IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 46, no. 4, 2000, pp. 998–1003. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26286181. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.

Miller, Jim. “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 1998, pp. 336–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240705. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.

Mirza, Kanza Fatima, et al. “Gender, Capitalism, and Environmental Degradation: A Material Ecofeminist Analysis of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sorrow.” Panacea Journal of Linguistics & Literature, 5 Sept. 2024, journals.airsd.org/index.php/pjll/article/view/289.

Usoro, Rebecca. “Article ~ Emerging Gender Perspectives of the African Americans in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Parable of the Sower.” AKSU Journal of English, AKSU Journal of English, 15 Dec. 2023, aksujournalofenglish.org.ng/utuenikang/23/12/emerging-gender-perspectives-of-the-african-americans-in-octavia-butlers-fledgling-and-parable-of-the-sower/.

I was researching for sources in JSTOR, and looking around the suggested ones. These aren’t necessarily the ones I’ll use in my final paper. but they are good sources that I can potentially use for my paper.

Allen, Marlene. “Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ Novels and the ‘Boomerang’ of African American History.” “Callaloo”, vol. 32, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1353–1365.

This article examines historical and psychological elements in Butler’s novels, focusing on their exploration of trauma and resistance to change. It explains how “Parable of the Sower” uses speculative fiction to engage with societal anxieties.

Burkhart, Matt.“Trees Are Better than Stone’: Vital Commemoration in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels.” “Western American Literature”, vol. 56, no. 3–4, 2021, pp. 287–313.  

Discusses ecological resilience and adaptation themes in “Parable of the Sower”, offering a perspective on the characters’ psychological responses to environmental collapse and their resistance to traditional societal structures.

 Clausen, Daniel D.“Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” bWestern American Literature, vol. 56, no. 3–4, 2021, pp. 269–86.  This article explores the concept of mutual aid and community-building in response to environmental crises, shedding light on the resistance to change within larger societal frameworks in Butler’s speculative world.

 Guerrero, Paula Barba. “Post-Apocalyptic Memory Sites: Damaged Space, Nostalgia, and Refuge in Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2021, pp. 29–45.  

    Examines how damaged landscapes and memory contribute to psychological responses to environmental collapse and the reluctance of characters to embrace necessary transformations.

Éva Federmayer.“Migrants and Disaster Subcultures in the Late Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2017, pp. 347–70.  

   Offers an ecocritical perspective on migration and survival strategies, linking climate change anxiety with resistance to socio-political change.

I thought Weather and climate change were the usual centers in many Cli-Fi novels, as I’ve seen in Octavia Butler’s “Sower ” or Amitav Ghosh‘s “The Hungry Tide”, where extreme weather events or environmental collapse drive the plot, in Jenny Offill’s “Weather”, this is not the center of the novel. Instead, Jenny Offill’s “Weather”  approaches climate change more subtly. The weather in “Weather”  in the first two parts of the novel does not seem to drive the narrative compared to other novels.

“Weather” confuses me from the very beginning of the novel, locating the reader in  Lizzie’s  consciousness. We join her world without much context or explanation. This is parallel in some ways to the uncertainty of today concerning climate change: something is coming, yet not quite when and how it will actually happen. Offil’s novel doesn’t open with a dramatic scene of natural disasters or apocalyptic weather, as many Cli-Fi novels do. Instead, the climate crisis is the background, an unseen yet felt presence, which parallels the way that many of us today live our lives with knowledge of climate change but by no means acting actively concerned by it. In Weather, it is talked about and spoken through Lizzie‘s discussions with other characters. Lizzie‘s head is full of thoughts on the state of the world, but the weather itself doesn’t receive dramatic descriptions.

Weather is not a central plot to which characters seem to relate directly in their decisions and actions like In Butler’s “Sower” where many places were inaccessible because of the climate crisis they were facing. In “Weather” instead, the climate crisis is a background against what is happening in Lizzie’s life. For example, Lizzie‘s brother is fixated on doomsday scenarios, whereas Lizzie herself seems resigned to the coming disaster but is uncertain about how to prepare or respond. 

From what I’ve read the novel does not seem to be about catastrophic events of weather yet. The weather conditions seem to be a metaphor for the anxiety that Lizzie is experiencing in her day-to-day life. Lizzie‘s life is a series of fragmented moments and interactions with her family and colleagues yet she has this underlying anxiety about the future. Lizzie’s character seems to be unmotivated and waiting for a disaster that seems inescapable.

In the first two parts of this novel, I have found myself wondering why it’s called Weather and questioning Offil’s choice of making this novel in what I consider a confusing narrative. Yet from all the books concerning weather this semester, Offil’s novel is the most realistic. We are currently experiencing impacting levels of climate change and I wonder if we are reacting the same way Lizzie does. In this way where something is not right, yet we still live our day-to-day lives not making this issue the center.

Question: How does Jenny Offill’s minimalist and fragmented narrative structure in Weather play with temporality & reflect society’s difficulty in both conceptualizing and acting in the current climate crisis? How does this shape the novel’s portrayal of existential uncertainty about the future?

Peinado-Abarrio, Rubén “‘FRAGMENTED AND BEWILDERING:’ THE NEW RISK SOCIETY IN JENNY OFFILL’S WEATHER'” https://institucional.us.es/revistas/estudios/26/peinado-abarrio.pdf 

Preston, Alex (The Guardian) “Jenny Offill: ‘I don’t miss the world as much as, perhaps, I should’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/09/jenny-offill-weather-climate-crisis-coronavirus-donald-trump

Bernhard, Stephanie (LA Review of Books) “Survival Tips: On Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/survival-tips-on-jenny-offills-weather/ 

Sehgal, Parul (New York Times) “How to Write Fiction When the Planet Is Falling Apart” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/magazine/jenny-offill-weather-book.html 

Question: How does Butler’s portrayal of Earthseed in Parable of the Sower defy traditional religious narratives by redefining divinity as “change,” and how does this redefinition affect concepts of resilience and community within a dystopian context?

As I searched for sources, I looked at the Jstor database and the Hunter Onesearch library database. I typed in keywords like “Parable,” “Sower,” and “Parable of the Sower,” along with religion and dystopia. I typed part of my question into the search option and got some results. However, that did not work too well for the MLA database because my options there were quite limited, and either I didn’t use the right keywords, or the database didn’t have what I was specifically looking for. I found it helpful to type keywords that I could use to describe my main thesis/argument because I had more articles to work with that way. I also tried to search under the names of critics we read about in class (i.e, Canavan).  

Govan, Sandra Y. “Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical Novel.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 230, 2007, pp. 1–131.

Melzer, Patricia. “‘All That You Touch You Change’: Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Femspec (Cleveland, Ohio), vol. 3, no. 2, 2002, pp. 31-.

Yaszek, Lisa. “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future.” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, pp. 41–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300600950236.

Phillips, Jerry. “The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 35, no. 2/3, 2002, pp. 299–311. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1346188. Accessed 18 Nov. 2024.

STILLMAN, PETER G. “Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler’s Parables.” Utopian Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2003, pp. 15–35. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20718544. Accessed 18 Nov. 2024.

Dubey, Madhu. “Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women’s Fiction: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 27, no. 1, 1999, pp. 103–28, https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1999.0017.

Andreolle, Donna Spalding. “Utopias of Old, Solutions for the New Millennium: A Comparative Study of Christian Fundamentalism in M.K. Wren’s A Gift Upon the Shore and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Utopian Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2001, pp. 114–23.

Allen, Marlene D. “Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ Novels and the ‘Boomerang’ of African American History.” Callaloo, vol. 32, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1353–65, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.0.0541.

Agusti, CE. “The Relationship Between Community and Subjectivity in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Extrapolation, vol. 46, no. 3, 2005, pp. 351–59, https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2005.46.3.7.

Ruffin, Kimberly T. “Parable of a 21st Century Religion: Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic Bridge between Science and Religion.” Obsidian III, vol. 6/7, 2005, pp. 87–104. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44511664. Accessed 18 Nov. 2024.

Canavan, G., 6, J., Hairston, A., 17, J., Kadue, K., 12, N., Kemp, S., 14, N., Maginity, J., Jacobs, G., & 3, N. (2014, June 9). “there’s nothing new / under the Sun, / but there are new suns”: Recovering octavia E. butler’s lost parables. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theres-nothing-new-sun-new-suns-recovering-octavia-e-butlers-lost-parables/