Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2021, English

American author Ursula K. Le Guin explores the theme of othering through speculative fiction about encountering new civilizations, initially viewing them as hostile due to their differences, and exploring ways of reconciling their otherness. Her first three novels, published in 1966-67 as the Hainish trilogy, establish these themes: each protagonist experiences an archetypal journey combining physical travel with personal, social, and cultural development that counters their instincts to other the unfamiliar civilizations. The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin's first novel on themes of gender and sexuality, is widely considered the first feminist science fiction novel, a genre that counters popular male-centric science fiction tropes and challenges their othering of women. The novel proposes relationships and interdependence as counters to othering, allowing readers to imagine interpersonal connections based on relationality.

Committee: Rick Incorvati (Advisor); Scot Hinson (Committee Member); Michael Anes (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature

Artium Baccalaureus (AB), Ohio University, 2017, English

Though some critics have often approached science fiction derisively, dismissing the genre as escapist, idealistic, or too depressing, many others have instead embraced its capacity to enable “thought experiments” about the future, about science and technology, and even about what it means to be human (Le Guin xiv). Ursula K. Le Guin, who is both an author and critic of science fiction, famously suggested that though these thought experiments are indeed extrapolative, “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (xiv). Despite its strange tropes of aliens, spaceships, distant planets, robots, and apocalypses, the worlds constructed in science fiction reflect the world around us, and reveal some things about our existing sociocultural structures that we might not have noticed otherwise. Consequently, works of science fiction have the unsettling effect of “defamiliariz[ing] certain taken-for granted aspects of ordinary human reality” (Hollinger 129). In other words, science fiction has a habit of making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. In this way, the themes of science fiction often overlap with the endeavors of feminist, gender, and queer theory: questioning identity categories, challenging the conventions of gender and sexuality, and calling attention to inequality. As Brian Attebery argues in Gender and Science Fiction, “both gender codes and the specialized vocabulary and narrative techniques of science fiction frequently fulfill the social function of marking boundaries” (3). Both feminism and sf “mark” normative boundaries, making them visible in order to upend them. Veronica Hollinger, a renowned feminist sf critic, takes the position that “analogous to feminist reading, feminist sf is not simply about women [...] it is a potent tool for feminist imaginative projects that are the necessary first steps in undertaking the cultural and social transformations that are the aims of the feminist political enterprise” (Hollinger 128). T (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nicole Reynolds Dr. (Advisor); Joseph McLaughlin Dr. (Other) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Gender Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2011, English/Literature

The concept of utopia is not merely the idea of a good place, nor is it simply to be thought of as the no place of imagination. It is instead an ambiguous site of revolt, creating infinite change by challenging the status quo, and landing most frequently in dystopia. In utopia, then, is dystopia, separate but linked elements that revolve around each other in an endless dance of disillusion and inspiration. Utopia is not simply good, but contains within it the ambiguity of hope and despair because of this connection to dystopia. This thesis sets out first to understand these concepts, reviewing recent scholarship in the field of utopian studies and proposing a comprehensive definition with which to approach utopian literature. Establishing a definition of utopia that focuses on the function of utopian desire itself, it then explores Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as an exemplary text in which to find not only the relationship between utopia and dystopia, but also the necessary ambiguity that so colors each. This exploration centers not on what the utopia of The Dispossessed looks like so much as it considers how the notion of utopia itself threatens the present by connecting it to the future, moving it out of inertia and into the momentum of constant revolution. What Le Guin's novel most importantly reveals through critical inquiry is not a template for social change, but a template for social questioning. This social questioning, in turn, reveals itself not as unique to Le Guin or The Dispossessed, but as a hallmark of speculative fiction which serves to mark the genre as the ideal locus of utopian literature. Defining speculative fiction reveals to be a difficult task, as its subgenres have historically been concerned with their distinctions, rather than their similarities. In their shared exploration of possibility, however, they emerge as more similar than not, united in their ability to express the desires so essential to utopia, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Erin Labbie PhD (Advisor); Bill Albertini PhD (Committee Member); Esther Clinton PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

BA, Kent State University, 2013, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

KIRA BRAHAM DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH THE TROUBLE WITH INDIVIDUALISM: SOCIAL BEING IN LE GUIN AND DELANY (72 pp.) Advisor: Kevin Floyd This thesis examines four works of speculative fiction: The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany. It also considers at length the early works of Karl Marx and his dialectical method. I propose that the societies imagined in the works of Le Guin and Delany challenge the concept of individualism as proposed by capitalist ideology and provide productive ways in which to consider the Marxian philosophy of the individual as social being. I argue that individualism as an abstract concept is damaging to the substantive individuality which is formed only through the real interaction involved in the construction of communal identities. This thesis seeks to combat misunderstandings concerning the leveling effects of communal identity by examining the ways in which the texts considered present the individual as simultaneously unique and communal in nature. In presenting alternative understandings of individuality, these texts substantially challenge established norms concerning the relationship of the individual to labor, political systems, domestic life, and her own sexuality.

Committee: Kevin Floyd PhD (Advisor) Subjects: Gender Studies; Labor Relations; Literature; Modern Literature