Visible and hidden walls in Ursula K. Le Guin's utopian novel "The Dispossessed"

Visible and hidden walls in Ursula K. Le Guin's utopian novel

Author: Tom Keller

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 19

ISBN-13: 3668191204

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Document from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Technical University of Braunschweig (Englisches Seminar), course: Cultural Studies, language: English, abstract: In Ursula K. Le Guin ́s utopian novel "The Dispossessed", published in 1974, one of the central images are walls, which exist in different shapes and various places, separating people or enclosing them. Some function like a prison, where nobody can break through, while others offer possibilities like freedom and choice. Furthermore, having two sides, walls appear to be ambiguous, depending on the view and interpretation of the individual. The novel describes several walls of different types like hierarchy, superiority, greed, possession, lies or physical boundaries. They appear throughout the novel and get demolished one after another. Shevek, the main protagonist, faces those boundaries, identifies them and tries to tear them down. Basically, the planets in the story are clearly separated, with them their people and also their cultures. Anarres, at first sight, has just one physical wall, surrounding the port and simultaneously the whole society. Based on a revolution which had the aim of pure freedom and a brotherly society, Anarres has no governmental laws, having an anarchistic society with secretly growing boundaries. Urras is the opposite, consisting of many obvious physical and cultural walls. The people, greedy and egoistic, live between the boundaries, being disconnected by their possessions and their attitudes.


The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

Author: Laurence Davis

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2005-11-22

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0739158201

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The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions—and snares—of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this wide-ranging, international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed. The book concludes with an essay by Le Guin written specially for this volume, in which she reassesses the novel in light of the development of her own thinking over the past 30 years.


The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Turtleback Books

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780785764038

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A brilliant physicist attempts to salvage his planet of anarchy.


The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

Author: Laurence Davis

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780739110867

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Description of the seductions - and snares - of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society. This title, an edited collection of original essays on "Le Guin's The Dispossessed", represents an exploration of the political ramifications of this work by a wide interdisciplinary swath of scholars from around the world.


Powers

Powers

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2009-04-06

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 0152066748

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Young Gav can remember the page of a book after seeing it once, and, inexplicably, he sometimes "remembers" things that are going to happen in the future. As a loyal slave, he must keep these powers secret, but when a terrible tragedy occurs, Gav, blinded by grief, flees the only world he has ever known. And in what becomes a treacherous journey for freedom, Gav's greatest test of all is facing his powers so that he can come to understand himself and finally find a true home. Includes maps.


The Wave in the Mind

The Wave in the Mind

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Published: 2004-02-17

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1590300068

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Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.


Always Coming Home

Always Coming Home

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-02-27

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 9780520227354

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An "ethnographic" novel that portrays life in California's Napa Valley as it might be a very long time from now, imagined not as a high tech future but as a time of people once again living close to the land.


Woman on the Edge of Time

Woman on the Edge of Time

Author: Marge Piercy

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 1997-06-23

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 044900094X

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Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow. Praise for Woman on the Edge of Time “This is one of those rare novels that leave us different people at the end than we were at the beginning. Whether you are reading Marge Piercy’s great work again or for the first time, it will remind you that we are creating the future with every choice we make.”—Gloria Steinem “An ambitious, unusual novel about the possibilities for moral courage in contemporary society.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “A stunning, even astonishing novel . . . marvelous and compelling.”—Publishers Weekly “Connie Ramos’s world is cuttingly real.”—Newsweek “Absorbing and exciting.”—The New York Times Book Review


The Female Man

The Female Man

Author: Joanna Russ

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1504050932

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Four alternate selves from radically different realities come together in this “dazzling” and “trailblazing work” (The Washington Post). Widely acknowledged as Joanna Russ’s masterpiece, The Female Man is the suspenseful, surprising, darkly witty, and boldly subversive chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael—all living in parallel worlds—meet. Librarian Jeannine is waiting for marriage in a past where the Depression never ended, Janet lives on a utopian Earth with an all-female population, Joanna is a feminist in the 1970s, and Jael is a warrior with claws and teeth on an Earth where male and female societies are at war with each other. When the four women begin traveling to one another’s worlds, their preconceptions on gender and identity are forever challenged. With “palpable anger . . . leavened by wit and humor” (The New York Times), Russ both employs and upends genre conventions to deliver a wickedly satiric and exhilarating version of when worlds collide and women get woke. This ebook includes the Nebula Award–winning bonus short story “When It Changed,” set in the world of The Female Man.


The Lathe Of Heaven

The Lathe Of Heaven

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-07-19

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1668014963

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With a new introduction by Kelly Link, the Locus Award-winning science fiction novel by legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin, set in a world where one man’s dreams rewrite the future. During a time racked by war and environmental catastrophe, George Orr discovers his dreams alter reality. George is compelled to receive treatment from Dr. William Haber, an ambitious sleep psychiatrist who quickly grasps the immense power George holds. After becoming adept at manipulating George’s dreams to reshape the world, Haber seeks the same power for himself. George—with some surprising help—must resist Haber’s attempts, which threaten to destroy reality itself. A classic of the science fiction genre, The Lathe of Heaven is prescient in its exploration of the moral risks when overwhelming power is coupled with techno-utopianism.