Research question: How does Butler’s Parable of the Sower navigate the impact of the crack epidemic on the socioeconomic, political, and environmentalist sphere during the 1990s?

• Agar, Michael. “The Story of Crack: Towards a Theory of Illicit Drug Trends.” Addiction Research & Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, 2003, pp. 3–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/1606635021000059042.

• Flamini, Alessandro, et al. “Illegal Drugs and Public Corruption: Crack Based Evidence from California.” EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, vol. 69, 2021, pp. 102005-, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2021.102005.

• Murch, Donna. “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs.” The Journal of American History (Bloomington, Ind.), vol. 102, no. 1, 2015, pp. 162–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav260.

• Bourgois, Philippe. “Crack and the Political Economy of Social Suffering.” Addiction Research & Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, 2003, pp. 31–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/1606635021000021322. 
• Acker, Caroline Jean. “How Crack Found a Niche in the American Ghetto: The Historical Epidemiology of Drug-Related Harm.” BioSocieties, vol. 5, no. 1, 2010, pp. 70–88, https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2009.1. 
• Dunlap, Eloise, et al. “The Severely-Distressed African American Family in the Crack Era: Empowerment Is Not Enough.” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, vol. 33, no. 1, 2006, pp. 115–39, https://doi.org/10.15453/0191-5096.3138. 

My research process turned out to be more difficult than I’d originally expected because the key terms that I’d been putting into google scholar and JSTOR weren’t outputting results that would aid in my research. With that, I had to alter some parts of my research question to better fit. I narrowed it down to focus only on the decade in which the novel was written and instead of trying to encompass such a large topic, I decided to focus on one impact on the sphere of interest. The key search terms I used included: crack epidemic, (southern) California, 1990s, politics, environment(alism), and socioeconomics. I lucked out that most, if not all, of my sources were peer-reviewed and available through the Hunter library.

1. Lanteigne, Betty. “Regionally Specific Tasks of Non-Western English Language Use.” TESL-EJ 10.2 (2006): n2. 
2. Adick, Christel. “Modern education in ‘non-Western’societies in the light of the world systems approach in comparative education.” International review of education 38 (1992): 241-255.
3. Merriam, Sharan B., and Young Sek Kim. “Non-Western perspectives on learning and knowing.” The Jossey-Bass reader on contemporary issues in adult education (2011): 378-389.
4. Kachru, Yamuna. “Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching: A Non-Western Perspective.” (1985).

As I found these sources, I realized I might want to tweak my question a bit. Instead of talking about how language was used in The Hungry Tide I might want to involve how education played a role in shaping the characters as well as the reason for how many events played out as they did.

Drzata, Elijah, “Gender in Dystopia: The Persistence of Essentialist Ideologies in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower”, May 2019 https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=urj

• Griffiths, Gareth. “Silenced worlds: Language and experience in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide”. Kunapipi, 34(2), 2012. 
• Jon Kertzer (2018) Amitav Ghosh’s zubben: Confluence of languages in the Ibis trilogy, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54:2, 187-199, DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2017.1406393 
• Kalaiarasan M., Sowmiyalaltha R. “Trans-cultural Communication in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide”, Vol. 19:7, July 2019, p. 323-328. 
• Rollason Christopher. “In Our Translated World: Transcultural Communication In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide”, The Atlantic Literary Review, vol. 6, No. 1-2. 
• History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction, edited by Chitra Sankaran, State University of New York Press, 2012. 
• Tasnim, Zakiyah. “Transformation of English language in Amitav Ghosh’s The hungry tide.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2018, p. 145, https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.9n.3p.145. 

       In Ben Lerner’s novel  10:04 the concept of time is shown  all through the Book . We are able to first see this  in the beginning of the novel when he suddenly finds himself in the pediatrics office. He is looking around the room and realizes that he is in a place where he doesn’t belong.Ben has been diagnosed with a heart problem  which should have been found when he was a child.  “A giant octopus was painted on the wall of the room where I’d been sent the previous September for evaluation– an octopus star fish  and various gill-bearing  aquatic craniate animals— for this was the pediatrics wing “ (pg.4).  He realizes that  he has no time and that this should have been something he should have known sooner .It’s as if he has a time ticking bomb that can go off anytime . Ben is aware that his time is limited.  The way in which we think a child should be born and conceived is completely different from  what we traditionally know . They instead used IUI, a way in which they can both have a baby without having to do it the traditional way . This made  Ben think of what his future child would think of the process.  Ben often speaks  about the future and what life will be like. It seems that he is always worried about time, especially since he has a condition that can cause his death anytime .It is only normal for him to be worried about silly things like  what his future kids will think of how they were made  and so on . This novel was very interesting as we were able to learn about   the concept of time and how it affects Ben’s world.