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Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest

Paul Giles

in The Global Remapping of American Literature

This chapter examines the metaregional dimensions of the Pacific Northwest and the ways in which its very inscription as a region elucidates the fraught and contested relation between text and place ... More

This chapter examines the metaregional dimensions of the Pacific Northwest and the ways in which its very inscription as a region elucidates the fraught and contested relation between text and place in American literature. Elettra Bedon coined the term “metaregionalism” to describe a self-conscious manipulation of certain forms of dialect. On analogy with metafiction, metaregionalism might be said to foreground the assumptions involved in traditional ascriptions of place. The chapter first considers the epistemology of space before discussing how the Pacific Northwest was tackled in the writings of Gary Snyder, Ursula Le Guin, and Richard Brautigan. It also analyzes the fiction of William Gibson and Douglas Coupland; Gibson deploys Vancouver to achieve critical distance from the behemoths of U.S. capitalism, and Coupland brings his native Pacific Northwest into the wider oceanic orbit of Asia and Australasia in order to chart a generational passage away from domestic security and entitlement.Less

Experts Without Institutions: New Left Professionalism in Marge Piercy and Ursula K. Le Guin

Stephen Schryer

in Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction

This chapter discusses the New Left Movement, focusing on the contradiction within its vision, and examining two works supporting its ideals. The New Left is a movement of young professionals who ... More

This chapter discusses the New Left Movement, focusing on the contradiction within its vision, and examining two works supporting its ideals. The New Left is a movement of young professionals who hope to disseminate their version of the culture of critical discourse throughout the welfare state. However, it was also a movement of young professionals who distrusted the very notion of expert privilege and wanted to subject it to community controls. This contradiction toward the new class is central to one of the movement's most lasting literary legacies: the new utopian science fiction of the 1970s. The two most famous works in this genre are Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, both of which attempt to imagine what it might mean for professional expertise to displace economic capital entirely as society's ruling impulse.Less

: Dreams of Freedom: Piercy, Le Guin, and the Future of Utopia

Chris Ferns

in Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature

This chapter discusses the utopian fiction of Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin, and reflects on the contemporary trends in both utopian fiction and utopian studies addressed in the Introduction. Like ... More

This chapter discusses the utopian fiction of Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin, and reflects on the contemporary trends in both utopian fiction and utopian studies addressed in the Introduction. Like utopian fiction, the criticism of utopian literature also involves a narrative – whether of the death of utopia or of its salvation – and the study concludes with a consideration of the implications of such critical narratives.Less

The Sun Also Sets: Anthropology at the End of Empire in Ursula Le Guin and Laura Bohannan

Tim Watson

in Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World

It was in anthropological fiction that the challenges to the discipline of anthropology in the 1950s were most visibly registered, in terms of anthropology’s complicity with imperialism and its ... More

It was in anthropological fiction that the challenges to the discipline of anthropology in the 1950s were most visibly registered, in terms of anthropology’s complicity with imperialism and its adoption of technical and professional practices that excluded amateurs and outsiders. This chapter analyzes the early science fiction of Ursula Le Guin, in which anthropologists are protagonists who grapple with their dual role as bearers of imperial power and observers of indigenous customs. The second half of the chapter focuses on the work of the anthropologist Laura Bohannan, who turned her fieldwork in northern Nigeria into a novel, one that dramatizes the ambiguous position of the anthropologist as a woman, as a “European,” and as an American.Less

No Man’s Land: Feminised Landscapes in the Utopian Fiction of Ursula Le Guin

Gwyneth Jones

in Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality

In this chapter, Jones reviews various texts by Ursula Le Guin, including Always Coming Home, The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Sur. Jones draws attention ... More

In this chapter, Jones reviews various texts by Ursula Le Guin, including Always Coming Home, The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Sur. Jones draws attention to the depiction of the ‘South’ in literature as a whole, but more specifically in terms of the feminist utopias that Le Guin creates in her narratives. She also foregrounds the significance of navigating the political, social and gender codes of society and explores the ways in which masculinity and femininity often correspond to an imbalance of power.Less

Electric Cars, Autoduelling, and Bike Shares in the New Wave

Jeremy Withers

in Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles: Contesting the Road in American Science Fiction

Chapter Three focuses on works from the New Wave era (c. 1960-1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, and Ernest Callenbach. The primary goal of the chapter will be to highlight how some science ... More

Chapter Three focuses on works from the New Wave era (c. 1960-1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, and Ernest Callenbach. The primary goal of the chapter will be to highlight how some science fiction writers of the Sixties and Seventies responded to two important events related to transportation: the dramatic spike in annual automobile fatalities that began in the early-1960s and climaxed in the early-1970s, and the growing environmentalism of this era.Less

The Word for World Is Forest: Metaphor and Empire in Science Fiction

in Science Fiction and Empire

This chapter discusses that metaphors in science fiction become the ‘basis for a modern oppression’, as stated by George Lakoff and Mark Turner. This claim is then supported by examining Ursula Le ... More

This chapter discusses that metaphors in science fiction become the ‘basis for a modern oppression’, as stated by George Lakoff and Mark Turner. This claim is then supported by examining Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which begins by using the simple metaphor of wall to symbolise the repression of the human race. Though the wall may seem unimportant, it signifies the transition between reality and fantasy similar to the surreal concept in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. Le Guin uses the wall as ‘an expression of imperial containment and exclusion’ while Lem focuses on the hostilities of human science.Less

Republic

Mark Storey

in Time and Antiquity in American Empire: Roma Redux

This chapter is the first of two “foundations” that form the second part of the book. Starting with an analysis of the analogies drawn between Donald Trump and Roman emperors across the mediascape of ... More

This chapter is the first of two “foundations” that form the second part of the book. Starting with an analysis of the analogies drawn between Donald Trump and Roman emperors across the mediascape of 2016, it introduces the temporal and political relationship between the Roman and American republics, via the work of Hannah Arendt and Ian Baucom. It then moves backwards through American history, from the twenty-first to the eighteenth centuries, bringing in a wide range of American writers: Ursula Le Guin, John Williams, Upton Sinclair, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Louisa McCord, Mercy Otis Warren, and several others. Keeping the Roman analogy at the heart of its discussions, this chapter ultimately demonstrates the ways in which writers generate networks of coeval connection between ancient past and modern present in order to variously uphold and break down the seemingly contingent political, social, and racial logics of American empire.Less

Walking Away: Lessons from “Omelas”

Saira Mohamed and Melissa Murray

in Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature

Chapter 12 explores Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous 1973 science-fiction short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which describes a picturesque utopian paradise and the dystopian bargain ... More

Chapter 12 explores Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous 1973 science-fiction short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which describes a picturesque utopian paradise and the dystopian bargain necessary to maintain it. The great happiness of the citizens of Omelas is premised on the continuous and abject suffering of a “feebleminded” child who lives alone in a basement. Most Omelans submit to this horrifying bargain with a sense of resignation, but each year a few who can no longer tolerate the bargain walk into the darkness and “do not come back.” Mohamed and Murray compare this story to what the criminal law says about those who attempt to walk away from group criminality. The legal defense of renunciation or abandonment for crimes such as conspiracy requires an active thwarting of the crime, which may underestimate the difficulty of extracting oneself from an environment of pervasive wrongdoing.Less

Year Zero Art: A Lost Generation Finds Its Voice in The Female Man

Gwyneth Jones

in Joanna Russ

“Year Zero Art” situates Second Wave feminism in the context of the “domestic revival” decreed by Cold War politics; examines historical female-ordered utopias, and provides a close reading of the ... More

“Year Zero Art” situates Second Wave feminism in the context of the “domestic revival” decreed by Cold War politics; examines historical female-ordered utopias, and provides a close reading of the polemic, idyllic, and lyric voices; the layered realities and the “many worlds” speculative-science content of Joanna’s highly personal 1975 novel, The Female Man. Essays and reviews described include radical feminist criticism of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels; the groundbreaking “Why Women Can’t Write”; the controversial “Image of Women in Science Fiction” and “Alien Monsters,” in which Joanna defines the pernicious sf figure of the “he-man.” Stories related to The Female Man (1971-75) include “When It Changed,” the Nebula Award-winning conventional sf version of The Female Man.Less

Psychoanalytic psychology

Gavin Miller

in Science Fiction and Psychology

This chapter begins with science fiction’s use of proto-psychoanalytic wisdom inspired by Nietzsche. Texts such as H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Croquet Player (1936), John ... More

This chapter begins with science fiction’s use of proto-psychoanalytic wisdom inspired by Nietzsche. Texts such as H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Croquet Player (1936), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), and Alfred Bester’s ‘Oddy and Id’ (1950) present civilization as a fragile veneer concealing displaced instinctual gratification. Superficially, such conservatism continues in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). However, both these novels challenge Freudianism by thematizing Freud’s pessimistic model of the mind – a critique intensified in Barry N. Malzberg’s The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985). Dreams, moreover, are celebrated in Ursula Le Guin’s Jungian novel The Word for World is Forest (1972), which estranges the colonization of traditional societies, and counterposes rootedness in the collective unconscious (thereby developing an aesthetic pioneered by Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea (1956)). Generic re-evaluation of psychoanalysis continues in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (1966), which (like Bester’s The Demolished Man (1956)) endorses psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and the unreliable narrative of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway (1977), where the protagonist’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy reconciles him to a future reality of brutal capitalist exploitation.Less

Feminist Bunker Fantasies

David L. Pike

in Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades

Feminist science fiction emerged during the late 1970s as a creative and political force, with the nuclear condition as a core element of this new form and its new approach to science fiction. ... More

Feminist science fiction emerged during the late 1970s as a creative and political force, with the nuclear condition as a core element of this new form and its new approach to science fiction. Despite the full awareness and acknowledgment of the horrors underpinning the postapocalyptic world, this body of work as a whole is hopeful and open to the future in ways that most other 1980s bunker fantasies were not. These are not only survivors’ songs, in other words; they are critical engagements with the complexity of historical change that refunctioned the spaces of the Cold War into new configurations. One of the primary, and often the only, positively bunkered spaces in the texts themselves during this period were the analogous forms of language, storytelling, words, and writing. While the positive, enabling bunker potentials of language—and the stultifying effects of its loss—remain a constant theme through this period, the changing representations of physical spaces in relation to language fall into roughly three periods, analogous to political changes in the cultural perception of nuclear threat. The sheltering power of language remains a constant throughout, as do the spatial association of the fallout shelter with masculine social structures and the nuclear condition, along with the central problematic of reproduction and reproductive futurism in relation to survival in a post-holocaust world; however, writers’ treatment of these themes changes.Less

Saving the Family? Children's Fiction

in Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s

In 1976, Thomas M. Disch described science fiction as a branch of children's literature because of its intellectual, emotional and moral limitations. Science fiction authors such as Robert A. ... More

In 1976, Thomas M. Disch described science fiction as a branch of children's literature because of its intellectual, emotional and moral limitations. Science fiction authors such as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury wrote for children and adults. The emergence of the Young Adult novel in the mid- to late 1960s changed children's literature. This chapter examines novelisations for children of science fiction films and television shows, stop-motion animations and animated and live-action Disney films, as well as children's novels by Andre Norton and Roald Dahl. It also considers fiction for teenagers and young adults by Alan Garner, Robert C. O'Brien, H. M. Hoover, Jan Mark and Ursula Le Guin.Less

The Ones Who Walk Away to Stay and Fight

Philip Gamaghelyan

in Wicked Problems: The Ethics of Action for Peace, Rights, and Justice

This chapter explores another angle to the challenges of leadership and activism. Drawing on the work of science fiction authors Ursula K. Le Guin and N. K. Jemisin, who have long engaged with ... More

This chapter explores another angle to the challenges of leadership and activism. Drawing on the work of science fiction authors Ursula K. Le Guin and N. K. Jemisin, who have long engaged with justice issues in their work, it identifies a range of political actors. These include those who acquiesce to injustice, those who leave, and those who stay and fight. The last group often faces significant challenges, including the dilemma of navigating both domestic pressures from a repressive state and well-meaning but overwhelming influence from outside allies. The chapter uses experiences from across the South Caucasus to explore the ethical trade-offs in alliance building in these complex situations.Less

Behaviourism and social constructionism

Gavin Miller

in Science Fiction and Psychology

This chapter explores science fiction’s deployment of behaviourism and social constructionism, which insist on the malleability of human psychology. B.F. Skinner’s near-future utopia. Walden Two ... More

This chapter explores science fiction’s deployment of behaviourism and social constructionism, which insist on the malleability of human psychology. B.F. Skinner’s near-future utopia. Walden Two (1948), authorizes the behaviourist model of the self by inscribing operant conditioning into long-standing progressivist discourses. But this is subverted by the novel itself, which persistently endorses historical, philosophical, and ethical discourses that have supposedly been rendered obsolete. Behaviourism is further undermined by Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and William Sleator’s House of Stairs (1974). These narratives juxtapose against behaviourism counter-discourses from different sources, including wisdom traditions such as world religions, and also antagonistic discourses such as psychoanalysis and existentialism. Social constructionism encourages science fiction to dissolve psychological and cultural givens of our time (such as heterosexuality or patriarchy) in a future or alternative social order. With enormously varying complexity and ethical sensitivity, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Edmund Cooper’s 1972 Who Needs Men? and Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three (1974), explore the utopian and dystopian reconstruction of gender relations, but are troubled by issues of natural and cultural diversity.Less

Self-Reproducing Movements and the Enduring Challenge of Materialist Feminism

Wanda Vrasti

in Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises

What was the utopian vision of the Occupy movement that swept the world in the aftermath of the global financial crisis (GFC)? More generally, what types of utopias can be imagined today, and which ... More

What was the utopian vision of the Occupy movement that swept the world in the aftermath of the global financial crisis (GFC)? More generally, what types of utopias can be imagined today, and which notions of progress are still operative? And how do utopias allow people to engage in transformative action? Taking the need for utopian representation seriously, this chapter looks at three attempts to map out “utopia” : Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974); Marge Piercy’s seemingly conventional but at the same time revolutionary text, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976); and finally, the encampments built in the initial stage of the Occupy movement. Interestingly enough, all three examples offer glimpses of an anti-authoritarian utopia—a decentralized, egalitarian society where the principles of competition and accumulation have been replaced by mutual aid, self-government, and resource conservation to produce an almost spiritual synergy between people, nature, and culture.Less