ENG110Y5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Ursula K. Le Guin, Worldbuilding, Utopia
Document Summary
Identity and ethics, gender relations and power all concern her writing. This short story can be called a metafiction a work that is aware of its own construction, which calls to itself. It poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, and systematically and self-consciously draws the reader"s attention to the work"s status as an artifact. Here, le guin is constructing a utopia or attempting to construct one. The problem is that, as she repeatedly tells us in the story, we won"t believe her. We won"t believe this perfect society full of happy individuals. In her words, we consider happiness as something rather stupid and that only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting . A believable utopia is one with some kind of element of evil, of darkness. The real conflict happens in the narrative, the real story is how the narrator is telling, or trying to tell, this story.
