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

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.

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.

<p>Failed Feminism?: Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Tehanu</p><p>The purpose of this essay is to show that Ursula K. LeGuin’s fantasy novel Tehanu instead of breaking away from traditional gender roles maintains them, despite the novel’s promises of change. I begin by showing the places where the possibilities of change are indicated, and then I use feminist criticism to show that there is no change in the gender roles.</p><p>I have examined the gender roles in Tehanu, by taking a closer look at the characters and the roles they have in the plot. Numerous critics claim that this novel is Le Guin’s attempt to revise her earlier, more traditional fantasy novels in the Earthsea trilogy, and that Tehanu works as a feminist reaction to the Earthsea trilogy. However, even though Le Guin makes the traditional patriarchal gender roles apparent to the unaware reader, the protagonists have internalised the patriarchal values of their society when the novel closes, which may be fairly disappointing to the reader who brings feminist awareness to the reading of novel. The women are depicted as caregivers, and the men are portrayed as the decision-makers. The gender roles are as traditional as they can be with Ged as the man who is capable to read the wizard’s books, with Tehanu who stays with her family and does not leave with the dragons, and with Tenar as the woman who takes care of the household.</p>

Failed Feminism?: Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Tehanu The purpose of this essay is to show that Ursula K. LeGuin’s fantasy novel Tehanu instead of breaking away from traditional gender roles maintains them, despite the novel’s promises of change. I begin by showing the places where the possibilities of change are indicated, and then I use feminist criticism to show that there is no change in the gender roles. I have examined the gender roles in Tehanu, by taking a closer look at the characters and the roles they have in the plot. Numerous critics claim that this novel is Le Guin’s attempt to revise her earlier, more traditional fantasy novels in the Earthsea trilogy, and that Tehanu works as a feminist reaction to the Earthsea trilogy. However, even though Le Guin makes the traditional patriarchal gender roles apparent to the unaware reader, the protagonists have internalised the patriarchal values of their society when the novel closes, which may be fairly disappointing to the reader who brings feminist awareness to the reading of novel. The women are depicted as caregivers, and the men are portrayed as the decision-makers. The gender roles are as traditional as they can be with Ged as the man who is capable to read the wizard’s books, with Tehanu who stays with her family and does not leave with the dragons, and with Tenar as the woman who takes care of the household.

In this study I examine the arguments made by Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice in defence of a positive role for literary engagement in the process of moral and political judgement formation. Nussbaum argues that novel reading offers a unique chance to engage our empathy in morally beneficial ways, because it stands as a kind of practice run for appropriate moral judgement through the adoption of an emotionally engaged yet critically distant “Judicious Spectator” stance when reading. I examine her account of the activity and purported benefits of reading and argue that her use of the Judicious Spectator concept is incompatible with her claims about the structure of novels and the experience of reading. I suggest examining an alternative set of fictions, namely the genre of science fiction and in particular Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness as a means to assess whether Nussbaum’s account plausibly captures the moral value of reading fiction. I argue that even a charitable reading of Nussbaum’s Judicious Spectator concept cannot explain the central thought experiment at the heart of Le Guin’s novel, as it invites readers to contemplate a re-evaluation of their own self-identities or foundational assumptions, allowing them to abandon beliefs and understandings that have perhaps unwittingly coloured their previous moral reasoning without undergoing the scrutiny of justificatory rigour. This resulting type of re-evaluation is, I argue, primarily self-reflective in nature and not externally directed to programmatic outcomes like the possible interpretations of the novel available to Nussbaum. This good, which I label ‘appropriate doubt’, is defended as a general feature of certain kinds of novel reading, and as worthy of moral attention. I conclude that this shows Nussbaum’s account of engagement with fiction to be at best, incomplete.

Throughout her work as a novelist, Ursula K. Le Guin revisits the theme of balance. In The Word for World is Forest and The Lathe of Heaven, she brings dreaming into contact with balance as a force that either supports and facilitates a state of equilibrium or undermines and impedes it. The indigenous Athsheans of Word for World achieve psychological and physical balance by participating in a communal dreaming process in which they enter the lucid dream-time state that takes place between dreaming and waking. George Orr, in Lathe, however, fears his personal balance and that of the world are jeopardised by his capacity for “effective dreaming,” an ability that allows him to change “reality.” The ways in which balance is treated in the two novels provide grounds for comparison. This paper will reveal how balance is achieved through dreams for the Athsheans, while George Orr’s balance is threatened by dreams, and how community and threatening external forces play into this difference.

This thesis examines and explores the process of coming of age in successful fantasy fiction series, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novel and its prequel The Hobbit, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. In particular, it is suggested that the huge popularity of fantasy stems from the fact that it provides a representation of human agency significantly at odds with the everyday experience of an increasingly bureaucratized and financially-determined world. Analysis shows how fantasy texts provide a universal model that help younger readers to understand the process of maturity as individuation and entry into the intersubjective social world. The central protagonists of such texts have to learn to master concepts such as seeing oneself in the other through intersubjective dialogues, objectifying one’s self in the world, and coping with their own battles, in the process of finding their way to maturity. This fictional “quest” or “journey” provides a model for readers to assess their own realities and actions, which in turn has the effect of changing their understanding and enabling them to critique their own lives. It is demonstrated how these classic and widely translated works of fantastic literature, which reach a huge crossover readership, may be understood in terms of parallel transformational stages such as confusion, inattentional blindness, fear, courage and various attempts of learning the need for moderation. Overall, this analysis, comprising the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, education, behavioural economics, sociology, media, and history, explores the processes of transformation and maturation within fantasy literature. At the same time, the case for fantasy literature’s uniqueness in its capacity to reveal the mechanisms of human agency is substantiated within a theoretical framework.

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Syftet med uppsatsen är att belysa hur olika grupper framställs och förhåller sig till varandra vid kulturmöten på grundval av deras etnicitet i en skönlitterär fantasyserie och hur detta kan bidra till att upprätthålla eller problematisera koloniala maktrelationer som den västerländska kulturella normen. I denna studie analyseras fantasybokserien The Earthsea Cycle och de grupper som befolkar dess fiktiva värld: det hardiska och det kargiska folket. Med hjälp av bland annat begreppet den Andre, som syftar till att beskriva de som avviker från den egna gemenskapen, ämnar studien uppmärksamma vad som explicit förmedlas genom exempelvis karaktärsbeskrivningar och händelseförlopp samt synliggöra mer implicita mönster och strukturer i bokseriens framställning av de olika grupperna. Studiens resultat visar att relationen mellan de olika grupper i The Earthsea Cycle till stor del präglas av en dikotomi. Grupperna definieras i förhållande till varandra och framstår således som motpoler. Genom synen på den Andre och de egenskaper som tillskrivs respektive grupp är det möjligt att likna de fiktiva grupperna vid motsatsförhållandet mellan Occidenten och Orienten. Detta förhållande utmärks således även av en hierarkisk struktur till följd av att det orientaliskt kodade folket över lag attribueras vad som framstår som sämre egenskaper som outvecklat, våldsamt och irrationellt, i enlighet med redan befintliga stereotypa föreställningar. Detta folk underordnas följaktligen en kultur som tillskrivs en västerländskt kodad karaktär, vilken innefattar karaktärsdrag som fredlig, förnuftig och progressiv.