Academia as a vocation. Thoughts on teaching, scholarship, and the other things that the privilege of being an academic affords the ability to think about. I also use this blog when I teach as a central repository of stuff related to various courses, so you'll find some of that if you browse here too.
21.5.12
S/S/F Summer 2012: Speaker for the Dead
Here is a place for people to post their questions for the class discussion of Speaker for the Dead as comments.
So, from all the times I've read Speaker for the Dead (a lot of times) one question that has never been answered for me has been the question of why we don't ever see or hear about other tribes of Piggies. I mean, they obviously are integral to certain elements of the story, but why is it that the Lusitanians never go out to interact with other Piggies or see them?
In my opinion, the most important theme of Speaker for the Dead is understanding identity. The frequent harping on Valentine's Hierarchy of Exclusion as well as the question of religion shows that Card believes that in dealing with the "other" it is necessary to have an understanding of identity and, to a certain extent, community. Is it more important when dealing with the "other" to have an understanding of personal identity or to be able to empathize with that "other?"
How do the interpersonal, intercultural, and inter-group relationships in the book mirror and interact with each other? In particular, the roles of dominance and subservience, in all three scales.
I found it fascinating that the attitudes of humans between the original Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead has changed so much. In the first book, the humans react to the presence of another race, the buggers, with fear and paranoia that eventually becomes violence. However, several thousand years into the future, Humans protect the next, fledgling alien intelligence they discover, with the starways congress eventually attempting to remove all traces of humanity from the piggies world, so as not to contaminate them (sort of like the prime directive in star trek). It is also interesting to note that as the slayer of a species, Ender is not thought of as a hero, but his name is use as a curse.
In both Ender's Game and Speaker's for the Dead, the potential for violence exists due to a mutual misunderstanding between the parties involved. With miscommunication inherent to any interaction between species alien to one another, does this render conflict an inevitable probability not because of mutually exclusive interests (the general assumed cause of conflict) but because of this inability to communicate? Where is this paralleled in the real world?
For all of the hatred directed towards Ender for committing Xenocide against the buggers, it seems odd that no one knows that he did it against his will and had no knowledge of knowing that he was commanding the forces of humanity. No one seems to forgive him for just being a child when he did it, and no one seems to blame the military for raising him to be a conqueror and killer. Why is all of this hatred directed towards Ender only? Is it because humanity requires a face to hate what they've done in the past, a scapegoat to divert their own guilt they feel from their own terrible past?
6 comments:
So, from all the times I've read Speaker for the Dead (a lot of times) one question that has never been answered for me has been the question of why we don't ever see or hear about other tribes of Piggies. I mean, they obviously are integral to certain elements of the story, but why is it that the Lusitanians never go out to interact with other Piggies or see them?
In my opinion, the most important theme of Speaker for the Dead is understanding identity. The frequent harping on Valentine's Hierarchy of Exclusion as well as the question of religion shows that Card believes that in dealing with the "other" it is necessary to have an understanding of identity and, to a certain extent, community. Is it more important when dealing with the "other" to have an understanding of personal identity or to be able to empathize with that "other?"
How do the interpersonal, intercultural, and inter-group relationships in the book mirror and interact with each other? In particular, the roles of dominance and subservience, in all three scales.
I found it fascinating that the attitudes of humans between the original Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead has changed so much. In the first book, the humans react to the presence of another race, the buggers, with fear and paranoia that eventually becomes violence. However, several thousand years into the future, Humans protect the next, fledgling alien intelligence they discover, with the starways congress eventually attempting to remove all traces of humanity from the piggies world, so as not to contaminate them (sort of like the prime directive in star trek). It is also interesting to note that as the slayer of a species, Ender is not thought of as a hero, but his name is use as a curse.
In both Ender's Game and Speaker's for the Dead, the potential for violence exists due to a mutual misunderstanding between the parties involved. With miscommunication inherent to any interaction between species alien to one another, does this render conflict an inevitable probability not because of mutually exclusive interests (the general assumed cause of conflict) but because of this inability to communicate? Where is this paralleled in the real world?
For all of the hatred directed towards Ender for committing Xenocide against the buggers, it seems odd that no one knows that he did it against his will and had no knowledge of knowing that he was commanding the forces of humanity. No one seems to forgive him for just being a child when he did it, and no one seems to blame the military for raising him to be a conqueror and killer. Why is all of this hatred directed towards Ender only? Is it because humanity requires a face to hate what they've done in the past, a scapegoat to divert their own guilt they feel from their own terrible past?
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