Abstract:
Selves and Others: The Politics of Difference in the Writings of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
has two founding premises. One is that Le Guin's writing addresses the political issues of the late
twentieth century in a number of ways, even although speculative fiction is not generally
considered a political genre. Questions of self and O/other, which shape political (that is, powerinflected)
responses to difference, infuse Le Guin's writing. My thesis sets out to investigate the
mechanisms of representation by which these concerns are realized.
My chapters reflect aspects of the relationship between self and O/other as I perceive it
in Le Guin's work. Thus my first chapter deals with the representations of imperialism and
colonialism in five novels, three of which were written near the beginning of her literary career.
My second chapter considers Le Guin's best-known novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
and The Dispossessed (1974), in the context of the alienation from American society recorded
by thinkers in the 1960s. In my third chapter, the emphasis shifts to intrapsychic questions and
splits, as I explore themes of sexuality and identity in Le Guin's novels for and about adolescents.
I move to more public matters in my fourth and fifth chapters, which deal, respectively, with the
politicized interface between public and private histories and with disempowerment. In my final
chapter, I explore the representation of difference and politics in Le Guin's intricate but critically
neglected poetry.
My second founding premise is that traditional modes of literary criticism, which aim to
arrive at comprehensive and final interpretations, are not appropriate for Le Guin's mode of writing, which consistently refuses to locate meaning definitely. My thesis seeks and explores
aporias in the meaning-making process; it is concerned with asking productive questions, rather
than with final answers. I have, consequently, adopted a sceptical approach to the process of
interpretation, preferring to foreground the provisional and partial status of all interpretations.
I have found that postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory, which focuses on textual gaps
and discontinuities, has served me better than more traditional ways of reading
