The Configuration of Materiality in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Utopian Worlds: A Study of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Huang, Yu-Ting
Abstract
In our reading of a utopian text, materiality in the fictional world has often been eclipsed by our concern for the ideology and political orientations within the story. However, utopia is composed of material things and surroundings just as much as its human inhabitants. As the new materialisms call for a renewed ontology that recognizes the agency, force, and vitality of nonhuman elements, utopian theories also need to reevaluate the concept of utopia, and see it as more than mere imposition of humans’ abstract ideal on the arrangement of inert matter. In this thesis, I first propose to initiate theoretical dialogue between Jane Bennett’s and Thomas Rickert’s new materialist theories and the historical materialist utopian theory of Ernst Bloch. I argue that there is a utopian affinity between these theories, and that it will benefit current utopian studies if we move towards a more materially-minded perspective. Secondly, I draw on Bennett’s concept of human-nonhuman assemblages and Rickert’s ambient rhetoric to examine Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974). In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin portrays the human body as having its own material agency when it enters into assemblage with other things, thus radically equalizing both humans and things within the assemblage. The Dispossessed further presents Le Guin’s imagination of how a community live out their utopian life even on a barren desert planet by attuning to the ambience of the surrounding material world. By an engagement with both utopian theory and Le Guin’s utopian works, this thesis seeks to explore Le Guin’s thoughts on the utopian relation between man and world, and transform utopia’s originally human-centric nature.
Subjects
Ambient rhetoric
Assemblage
Nonhuman agency
Ernst Bloch
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Dispossessed
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-105-R02122008-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):d642165f6f5c955c2cc138af94408913