Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 435-484).

Zugl.: München, Universiẗat, Diss., 2006 u.d.T.: Seyferth, Peter: Utopie in der Science Fiction von Ursula K. Le Guin.

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2006

Ursula K. Le Guin is often called a feminist science fiction author. Drawing on such theorists as bell hooks and R. W. Connell, I analyze three novels by Le Guin from a social constructivist feminist perspective. I discuss The Dispossessed as it relates to gender and the family in utopian writing, The Lathe of Heaven with respect to gender and race, and Lavinia and gender within the context of the overall trajectory of Le Guin’s writing. I conclude that these novels depict gender in ways that often essentialize identity, whether the novels’ presentations of gender align with liberal or radical feminist ideas, and sometimes represent characters more conservatively than the label “feminist author” might imply. I propose that Le Guin’s status as a feminist writer requires more specific qualification that accounts for the variety of beliefs in existence in contemporary feminist discourse.

This thesis explores the major novels of science fiction and fantasy writer, Ursula K. Le Guin: it follows her journey from her first imaginary country, Orsinia, through the inner lands of Earthsea and the outer spaces of the Hainish Ekumen to her Yin utopia in a future California and an Earthsea revisited. In each of these worlds she moves towards an experience of an inner, unified truth which is comparable to the ecstatic experience of the religious mystics and that of which T.S Eliot writes in his Four Quartets. Through her reading of the Taoist sages and the discovery of their perception of Life as a constant and ongoing process rather than as a series of isolated events or states, whether mystical or mundane, these worlds and planets become symbols of a way of life instead of static objects. In her medium, narrative, this way is embodied in the story: the movement towards that moment of enlightenment, which is revealed as the heart, the life-giving centre of each world. It is the home to which each journey returns. "True voyage is return' (The Dispossessed). Owing to this perception of the immanent (w)holiness of life, of the many, different realities, she moves from a serene Taoist equilibrium to an angry feminist rejection of the masculine, dualist, Western civilisation, in which Man has largely been perceived as a creature apart; apart from nature, a guest on this planet, belonging to another world. In her anarchist and feminist utopias she seeks a new spititual home, a less alienated identity for humankind. Despite this apparent "development", at the heart of aU her books there is that same joy in this, mortal life, the search for which she sees as the most essential of aU human pursuits. That, ultimately, is both source and subject of Le Guin's work; and each new world explored is a different manifestation of the joyful Tao, a celebration of life.

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

The androgyny of the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness is a vehicle for Ursula Le Guin's rhetoric concerning gender roles. Le Guin attempts to make the reader identify with an ideal form of androgyny, through which she argues that many of the problems of human existence, from rape and war to dualistic thought and sexism, are products of gender roles and would be absent in an androgynous world. The novel also links barriers of separation and Othering with masculine thought, and deconstructs these separative boundaries of opposition, while promoting connective borders which acknowledge difference without creating opposition. The novel thus criticizes gendered thought processes and social roles, because they lead to opposition and separation.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Hispánica mención Literatura

In this thesis, I explore the textual strategy of feminist revision employed by contemporary women writers. After investigating Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a prototype of feminist revision, I focus specifically on Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” as a revision of Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” Michèle Roberts’s The Book of Mrs Noah as a revision of the Old Testament Flood narrative, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad as a revision of Homer’s Odyssey and the Troy narratives, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia as a revision of Vergil’s Aeneid. Through investigating the historical and literary contexts of each revisioned text, I identify the critical focus of the revision and analyse the textual effect produced by the revision. In each case, the feminist revision exposes the underlying ideological assumptions of the source text. By rewriting the canonical narrative from an alternative perspective, each revision extends beyond the source text, altering meaning and reinterpreting key symbols for feminist ends.