New Materialism as viewed by others

       For my final blog post, I looked at my classmates' blog post on the topic of how New Materialism is viewed, that is blog post 4. In essence the topic delves into the intricacies of New Materialism and how it is related to dystopian environment. New materialism is a theory that was introduced by Jane Bennett. New materialism deals with a lot of topics such as assemblage, agency, thing power and binaries. While some of the posts focused on one single aspect of new materialism, others were more general and focused on each element of new materialism. I will provide a summary on what their thoughts were on the topic.

Summaries of the blog posts from my peers 

       For Maggie, she discussed in-depth on how binaries were shown in the different novels such as the binaries between male and female, between reason and emotion and between man and nature. She gave examples on how the binary between male and female existed in the dystopian world and she talked about how Lauren from the book Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, had to pretend to be a man in order to be able to move about freely. The Link to Maggie's Blogpost

A seed in nature

        I also looked at Caitlin's blogpost and she talked more about thing power and how this is portrayed in dystopian fiction. Thing power was another concept that Jane Bennet talked about and she referred to thing power as the ability for an object to hold power and transcend beyond what it is that it was made for. The idea of thing power is that man and nature are equal and as a result man is not superior to nature or other animals.  She also drew examples from the book Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. She gave the example of how the tracker jackers and the mutations were used as weapons against the tributes in the hunger games.  Caitlin's Blog Post

Tracker Jacker

       Another classmate's blogpost I read was that of Lauren and she talked about how there is a contrast between the rich and the poor based on the amount of possessions they have. The rich often have more possessions than they need while the poor wallow in poverty. She also talked about how the dystopian fiction tend to pass a message on the current state on humanity due to our disregard for the environment.  Lauren's Blog Post

A comic picture depicting the relationship between man and nature

The concept of New Materialism in my own blog post 

        Looking at my own blog post, I can draw on the similarities between theirs and mine. Maggie for example talked about the binaries that existed in dystopian fiction, I also talked about binaries focusing primarily on the divide between man and nature. In most of the books, the environment is often in a state of ruin due to effects of man's actions and in some it talks about how man finds refuge in nature such as in The Hunger games and The road. Although I gave an example of how the capitol used the tracker jackers as weapon on the tributes, for some reason, I did not actually think of how it was connected to thing power, I was thinking more along the lines of the binary between the technology and Man but it can actually be linked nothing power since tracker jackers are not necessarily real live insects.
I think looking back at the posts, there is a form of consistency on what New materialism entails and how this theory is portrayed in dystopian fiction.

Works Cited

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic Press, 2008.

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner Books, 1995. Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Print