Academic literature on the topic 'Le Guin, Ursula K , 1929-2018 Dispossessed'

ABSTRACT The phrase “ambiguous utopia” was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in the subtitle of her novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). That work appeared when utopian narratives had been displaced by dystopian imaginaries. This article embarks on a comparative analysis of three short stories: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), Angélica Gorodischer’s “Of Navigators” (1979), and N. K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018). Each author installs ambiguity at the center of their open-ended utopian imaginaries as a way to challenge dogma, pessimism, and complacency. Le Guin interrogates the boundary between belief and knowledge to hold the threat of authoritarianism at bay. Gorodischer, a friend and contemporary of Le Guin, is considered a central figure of Argentine science fiction and fantasy. Her story imagines the discovery of a second Earth set in 1492 and highlights the need for utopianism to challenge the legacy of colonization. Finally, Jemisin’s story is a critical homage to “Omelas.” Jemisin shares the decolonial impetus of Gorodischer’s fiction, and she constructs Um-Helat on an explicitly antiracist foundation. Instead of walking away, her characters actively fight the creeping threat of intolerance while working toward that better place.

The thesis deals with the Utopian and dystopian aspects of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home. To provide a basis for comparison with the endeavours of previous utopists, the first part is devoted to a historical account of literary Utopias, and to an examination of the signposts of the genre. This history is restricted to practical blueprints for the ideal commonwealth and excludes creations of pure fantasy. In tracing Utopian development from Plato to Wells, the influence of historical events and the mainstreams of thought, such as Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the rising importance of science, the discovery of new lands, the Enlightenment, Locke's Theory of Perfectability, Bentham's utilitarianism, the Industrial Revolution, socialism, the French Revolution, Darwinism, and the conflict between capital and labour is demonstrated. It is also shown how the long-range results of the Russian Revolution and the two world wars shattered all Utopian visions, leading to the emergence of the dystopia, and how the author reversed this negative trend in the second part of the twentieth century. In a study of forms of Utopian presentation, the claim is made that The Dispossessed features the first Utopia that qualifies as a novel: not only does the author break with the genre's tradition of subordinating the characters to the proposal, she also creates the conflict necessary for novelistic structure by juxtaposing her positive societies with negative ones. In part two, the Utopias and dystopias of both books are examined, and their features compared to previous endeavours in the genre. The observation is made that although the author favours anarchism as a political theory, she is more deeply committed to the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, seeing in its ideals the only way to a harmonious and just existence for all. In order to prove her point, Le Guin renders her Utopias less than perfect, placing one society into an inhospitable environment and showing the other as suffering from genetic damage; this suggests that the ideal life does not rest in societal organization or beneficent surroundings, but in the minds of the inhabitants: this frame of mind—if not inherent in a culture—can be achieved by living in accordance with the tao. Lastly, an effort is made to determine the anthropological models upon which Utopian proposals are constructed. The theory is put forth that all non-governed, egalitarian Utopias represent a return to the societal arrangements of early man, when his communities were still small and decentralized, and before occupational specialization began to set in; that all democratic forms of government are taken from the Greek examples, that More's Utopia might well have been modelled on the Athenian clans of the pre-Cleisthenes era, and that the Kesh society of Always Coming Home is based exclusively on the kinship systems of the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest.
Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate

La présente thèse se propose de montrer comment, malgré une notable diversité dans la forme comme dans les thèmes, l'œuvre d'Ursula K. Le Guin offre une remarquable cohérence autour d'images et structures fondamentales. Partant d'une organisation de base, fondée sur une opposition binaire, la romancière fait émerger un troisième terme, élément de synthèse entre les deux autres. C'est ce que démontre le système des personnages qui, mettant en regard deux clans, donne la vedette à des figures d'ethnologues qui, tout à la fois, maintiennent l'équilibre entre deux cultures et permettent la création de réseaux. Ce principe s'étend à des représentations purement linguistiques Le Guin postule en effet l'existence de deux langues, la langue du père, langue du pouvoir, et celle de la mère, langue du dialogue. Ces deux modes d'expression, pourtant si différents, semblent pouvoir atteindre une harmonie dans l'émergence d'une forme tierce, la langue de l'Art, dans laquelle s'élabore discours fondamentalement mixte et où se conjuguent oralité et écriture, poésie et prose. Deux personnages illustrent ce principe : l'androgyne, qui permet de poser la question du sexe et de mettre en lumière les disparités sociales auxquelles conduisent les caractéristiques masculines ou féminines ; le dragon qui s'offre comme la synthèse idéale des sexes, et donne toute leur part au maternel et au féminin. Ce rêve de synthèse se retrouve également dans une série d'images récurrentes, comme notamment celle de la pierre virile et du réseau maternel, combinées de façon idéale dans des représentations fondées sur le modèle du piège à rêves amérindien, modèle qui se retrouve aussi bien dans la toile d'araignée que dans certaines formes de mise en scène de l'activité onirique. L'œuvre se présente ainsi comme une forme d'hommage au père et à la mère de la romancière, ethnologues réputés, et parallèlement comme une illustration de la voix de la différence décrite par Carol Gilligan
This work aims at showing how, despite a great diversity in the forms and the themes, Ursula K. Le Guin's work organises its coherence around fundamental images and structures. Founded on a basic binary opposition, the writer develops a third term, a synthesis of the two others. This is illustrated by the system of characterisation (of the protagonists) which stages two clans featuring anthropologists who maintain the equilibrium between the two cultures while developing the creation of networks. This principle extends to purely linguistic representations. Le Guin postulates the existence of two languages, the Father tongue, the language of power, and the Mother tongue, the language of dialogue. These two modes of expression, although very different, tend towards harmony in the birth of a third term, the Language of Art, in which oral and written literature, prose and poetry intermingle. Two characters serve to illustrate this: first, the androgyn underlines the problem of sex and highlights the social differences; second, resulting from sexual differentiation, the dragon represents the ideal synthesis of the two sexes, and shows the importance of the maternal and the feminine features. This dream of two into one is also present in a series of recurrent images, namely the masculine stone, and the maternal network, ideally united in representations based on Amerindian dreamcatchers, a model also illustrated by the cobweb and in forms staging dreams. The work is thus a homage to Ursula K. Le Guin's father and mother, well-known anthropologists, and also an illustration of Carol Gilligan's theory of a "different voice"

La fabrication des noms dans le cycle de Earthsea d'Ursula Le Guin est un processus génétique surdéterminé qui invite à la comparaison avec trois modèles familiers de la création littéraire : le bricolage, la déconstruction et la psychogenèse. Cette création onomastique se trouve au coeur de la genèse de ces romans, et il s'avère que le sujet de la genèse est une préoccupation centrale de la fantasy contemporain. En même temps, ce corpus littéraire a pris une tournure langagière qui marque l'épistèmè de toute production majeure de la littérature et des sciences humaines à l'époque actuelle. En faisant une synthèse de ces deux observations, on arrive à l'idée que l'essence linguistique de la fantasy réside dans un retournement langagier : un retour vers les origines du texte et du genre, mais aussi vers une perception ancienne ou prémoderniste du langage, semblables à celles qui se trouvent dans la pensée sauvage ou dans l'enfance, et qui mettent l'accent sur les éléments les plus concrets, voire corporels de la parole. Gardant ces idées à l'esprit, on peut constater que cette étude de la fabrication des noms chez Le Guin est matérialiste dans sa vision et sa méthodologie, et cet accent mis sur le ton et la forme, la voix et le corps, mène vers des champs d'investigation bien différents de ceux de l'onomastique littéraire traditionnelle
The making of names in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin is an overdetermined genetic process that invites comparison with three familiar models of literary creation : bricolage, deconstruction and psychogenesis (jokework and dreamwork). Onomastic ceration lies at the heart of the Earthsea cycle, and the topic of genesis is in fact a central preoccupation of contemporary fantasy. At the same time, this literary corpus has taken that same linguistic turn which characterizes the épistèmè of the major part of literature and the humanities in the present age. Putting these two observations together, one arrives at the idea that, from the point of view of its language, the essence of fantasy lies in a linguistic return : a movement back to the origins of the text and the genre as a whole, and also to an ancient or premodernist perception of speech and writing similar to that found in La pensée sauvage (the savage mind) and childhood, both of which emphasize the concrete, corporal elements of language. Keeping these ideas in mind, one finds that this study of the fabrication of names in Le Guin's fantasy is materialistic in its outlook and methodology, and that the emphasis on sound and form, voice and body leads towards fields of investigation rather different from traditional literary onomastics, oftentimes exceeding the ordinary limits of interpretation

La Fantasy est aujourd’hui l’un des genres majeurs des littératures de l’Imaginaire et l’un des plus prolifiques. Revendiquant le statut de littérature mythique de notre époque, elle puise ostensiblement son inspiration dans les récits mythologiques et les contes tout en organisant la majorité de ses récits autour d’une quête centrale. Celle-ci, parce qu’elle ne cesse de ressurgir dans les espaces-temps de la Fantasy, parce qu’elle implique toujours des êtres surnaturels mythiques associés aux commencements du monde, à l’instar des Elfes, et parce que, racontée au passé, elle devient objet d’un récit renvoyant à un passé disparu, fonctionne comme un véritable mythe du genre.Le présent ouvrage vise à étudier plus avant ce mythe questuel de la Fantasy afin d’en dégager les constantes et de mettre à jour les thématiques privilégiées par le genre. À travers l’analyse comparative du «Seigneur des Anneaux» et du «Silmarillion» de J.R.R. Tolkien, du cycle de «Terremer» d’Ursula K. Le Guin et du roman «La Glace et la Nuit. Opus un – Nigredo» de Léa Silhol, l’étude replace le mythe questuel de la Fantasy dans l’histoire littéraire et souligne, sous sa gangue faussement archaïque, la modernité du genre et sa pertinence comme discours sur la condition humaine
Fantasy is now one of the major literary genres of imaginative fiction and one of the most prolific. Claiming to be the mythic literature of our time, it is mainly inspired by mythological narratives and fairy-tales, and it often organises its stories around a central quest. Since that quest constantly reappears in Fantasy space-times, often implies mythic supernatural beings, such as Elves, and becomes the object of a tale about a lost past, it functions as a genuine myth inside the genre.The present study intents to analyse the Fantasy quest myth in order to highlight its main aspects, and, through them, the favourite themes of Fantasy fiction. Through the comparative analysis of J.R.R. Tolkien’s «The Lord of the Rings» and «The Silmarillion», Ursula K. Le Guin’s «Earthsea Series» and Léa Silhol’s «La Glace et la Nuit. Opus un – Nigredo», the Fantasy quest myth is replaced in the literary history. Besides the analysis shows that, despite its apparent archaic aspects, Fantasy fiction is a modern genre and a relevant discourse about human condition

This dissertation analyses the protagonists in The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin, and looks at the extent to which they confront the Jungian archetype of the anima. I demonstrate that individuation and wisdom are not achieved in these characters until they confront the anima archetype within their individual psyches. I analyse the experiences and behaviour of each protagonist in order to identify anima confrontation (or lack thereof), and I seek to prove that such confrontation precipitates maturity and wisdom, which are goals of the hero's journey. The essential qualities of the anima archetype are wisdom, beauty and love. These qualities require acceptance of vulnerability. I argue that the protagonist is far from anima integration when he displays hatred and fear of vulnerability, and conclude that each protagonist is integrated with the anima when wisdom, beauty and love are evident in his character.
English Studies
M.A. (English)