"A heart that watches and receives": Ursula Le Guin and the American nature writing tradition.
Item
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Title
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"A heart that watches and receives": Ursula Le Guin and the American nature writing tradition.
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Identifier
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AAI9924837
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identifier
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9924837
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Creator
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Payne, Tonia L.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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This project examines the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin within the tradition of American nature writing. Looking at Le Guin's works in this light not only helps define American nature writing but also indicates how Le Guin's writings illuminate American society, as nature writing does, and how she uses narrative to suggest responses to cultural difficulties that must be negotiated. Three issues common to Le Guin and American nature writers are singled out: naming, the self in relation to the other, and the solitary self.;Le Guin forwards the project of American nature writing in part by appropriating nonfictional forms, including slave narratives, linguistic examinations, and, perhaps most significantly, ethnographic studies. Among nonfictional forms, ethnography and nature writing seem especially capable of altering the reader's viewpoint so that society does not seem "saturated in the known and recognizable" but rather "distant and surprising and discontinuous" (Raymond Williams, "The Tenses of Imagination," 265). Le Guin forges a fusion of nonfictional forms with fiction, creating "structures of feeling" that are particularly suited to contemporary society.;Le Guin's work heralds a new aspect of the novel through her deconstruction of American cultural history, creating primary identification with the other and simultaneously forging reconnections with natural history, which is inextricably tied with that cultural history. The contemporary alienation of Americans from nature is profound, but Le Guin reminds the reader that alienation need not mean disconnection. Rather she shows how ethical connections can be established, not in spite of but because of difference and alienation.;Le Guin also consciously works to replace or revise current metaphors. Nature writers such as Le Guin centralize a need for connection, a respectful awareness of otherness, "rebearing" the metaphors that construct the human place in the cosmos. Le Guin estranges the reader from contemporary humanity and from the known world because she feels contemporary relationships are flawed. But she does not stop there; rather she works to place the reader in a position from which new connections must be formed, connections based on receptive curiosity, and openhearted acceptance, and love.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
