Review
2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/utopianstudies.31.1.0227
ISSN2154-9648
Autores Resumo“The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin” was an exemplary interdisciplinary event that brought together scholars across the humanities with those working in science and technology studies. Supported by the Chaire Arts & Sciences, École Polytechnique, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, the conference gave utopian studies specialists the opportunity to converse with experts in the philosophy of science, critical ecologists, and political philosophers. Unlike other single-author events this conference was not the product of an existing community of Le Guin scholars, meaning that the delegates were drawn together primarily through their enthusiasm for Le Guin’s writing, their interest in theorizing an “ethics for the Anthropocene”—as the conference’s subtitle indicates—and their shared loss at news of Le Guin’s death in January 2018. These four days provided a space for delegates to combine their urgent critical engagements with Le Guin’s work as it speaks to our contemporary moment with their attempts to commemorate the magnitude of her contribution to both literature and utopianism more broadly. Ranging from avid science-fiction fans to those who spent their childhoods navigating the archipelago of Earthsea, the speakers at “The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin” offered engaging, sensitive, and politically driven readings of Le Guin’s many wonderful works.The conference began on the evening of Tuesday, June 18, with a screening of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018). For some this was their first opportunity to see this documentary, which offers an introductory overview of Le Guin’s life and work and features original interview footage with Le Guin along with beautiful animated sequences that illustrate some of her most beloved fictional worlds.The following morning saw the beginning of the conference proper, held in the grand amphitheater—a former anatomy lecture hall—of the Institut du Monde Anglophone. After some words of welcome from organizers Sarah Bouttier, Pierre-Louis Patoine, and Christopher Robinson, we began the conference’s first panel: “Anthropocene.” Chessa Adsit-Morris (University of California, Santa Cruz) opened the discussion. She immediately delved into a critique of the term Anthropocene—pointing to how feminist, decolonial, and science-fictional modes of knowing are often decentered in homogeneous, catchall modes of theorizing. Adsit-Morris cited Le Guin’s short story “She Unnames Them” as a prompt to “unname” the Anthropocene—a project she has undertaken in her research with “Beyond the End of the World.” This opening paper was followed by Brad Tabas (École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées de Bretagne), who also problematized the term Anthropocene—a term that he noted Le Guin never publicly used. To Adsit-Morris’s theorization of ecological messiness he added the idea of darkness as a productive term in Le Guin’s work. Tabas’s paper was followed by Supriya Baijal (Dayalbagh Educational Institute) with the paper “Negotiating ‘Power’ and ‘Balance’ in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968).” Baijal drew on the image of the shadow in A Wizard of Earthsea as something that must be accepted into the self, thus continuing the interesting exploration into darkness and messiness offered by this panel. As a specialist in children’s literature she was also able to throw light on the pedagogical function of the text as a piece of ecocriticism. The final paper of the panel was given by Kim Hendricks (Flemish Research Foundation/Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). Hendricks engaged more explicitly in the potentially utopian function of science fiction than his fellow panelists, although again he returned to the idea of darkness, which he connected to Donna Haraway’s concept of the “thick present.” Hendricks opposed Le Guin’s focus on the present to the futurism that characterizes much utopian discourse, from the science fiction of David Brin to the political predictions of Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.We returned after lunch with a panel presentation titled “Worlds, Bonds, Beings.” The first paper was given by Eli Lee (independent), which focused on Le Guin’s experimental work Always Coming Home (1985). Lee argued for a reading of Always Coming Home as an eco-utopia that offers possibilities for rethinking human/nonhuman relations. Resisting the temptation to develop a binary reading of the text, Lee focused instead on its experimental form as a prompt to destabilize hierarchies and find a nonanthropocentric perspective. I (Katie Stone, Birkbeck, University of London) then delivered my paper titled “The Ethics of Time Travel in the Short Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin.” Here I built on Lee’s analysis of the nonhuman world by focusing on the question of linear time as an anthropocentric concept. Drawing on Grace Dillon’s work on indigenous science fiction I argued that Le Guin’s thoughts on the poetry of mountains, on a world in which time has fused to petrochemicals, and on time seen through the whirlpools of a river encouraged a radical decentering of the human. Finishing our panel, Francis Gene-Rowe (Royal Holloway, University of London) gave his paper on ecological grief: “The Language of the Dusk: Finding Equilibrium in an Ending World.” Gene-Rowe returned to the concept of the Anthropocene as itself anthropocentric. In his reading of The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and The Farthest Shore (1972) he applied S. B. Banerjee’s theory of necrocapital to a theorization of actively mourning the worlds we have lost and which have never been.The third panel of the day began with a paper from Arwen Spicer (Clark College), “Indigeneity and Utopia in Le Guin’s Ekumen.” Spicer discussed Le Guin’s privileged position as a rich, white settler as well as her adoption of an anthropological stance and how these factors are infrequently acknowledged in criticism of Le Guin. Spicer then explored the work Le Guin did to negotiate her own privileged position, including embracing a multiperspectival view in her Ecumen novels. Spicer suggested that Le Guin could be usefully read alongside such works as Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Take Us to Your Chief” (2016). Spicer’s paper was followed by a joint paper from Miranda Iossifidis and Lisa Garforth (Newcastle University) that offered a sociological perspective on Le Guin’s work. Their paper was divided between Garforth’s reading of Always Coming Home as a green critical utopia—a term she borrows from Tom Moylan—and Iossifidis’s discussion of “The Matter of Seggri” (1994). Both scholars focused on the fragmentary form of these texts and the ambiguous relationship of Le Guin’s readership to the worlds she depicts. They suggested that Le Guin provokes a creative response from her readers and critics, which they connected to the sociological research project Prospecting Futures Online. The final paper of this panel was given by Stefan Schustereder (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) and was titled “A Cruel Mirror in Space? A Postcolonial Reading of Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1972).” Schustereder again drew our attention to Le Guin’s use of multiple perspectives and to her interest in the potential of the ambiguously positioned anthropologist for establishing a decolonial worldview. He argued for the relevance of this text in today’s ecological climate alongside Le Guin’s more revered works.The day ended with a keynote from the author of a forthcoming Le Guin biography, Julie Phillips (independent). Phillips’s keynote, “Love and Language: Ursula K. Le Guin in Paris,” gave an intimate and engaging portrait of a young Ursula Kroeber’s first trip to Paris. Phillips discussed her role as Le Guin’s biographer as a form of time traveling before focusing on Le Guin’s many loves: for science fiction, for writing, for her husband, Charles. She ended by elaborating on the theme of homecoming in Le Guin’s writing and the idea that Paris was, for her, another home to which she was “always coming.”The conference’s second day began with a paper from David Creuze (Université de Lille). In the third paper of the conference to address Always Coming Home, Creuze focused his reading of this “yin utopia” through Le Guin’s influential essay: “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be” (1982). He theorized that Le Guin’s work established a dialogic relationship between text and reading—noting that her focus on character rather than setting transformed our understanding of what literary utopias might look like. Creuze’s paper was followed by one given by Liesl King (York St John University). King also drew on Le Guin’s theorization of California “as a cold place to be”—suggesting that coldness and slowness will be crucial in navigating climate catastrophe. Referencing a number of works that span Le Guin’s oeuvre, King connected this slow movement to the work undertaken in the online journal Terra Two: An Ark for Off-World Survival.This panel was followed by Brian Attebery’s (Idaho State University) keynote: “Always Coming Home, the Library of America, and the Hinge in Le Guin’s Career.” Attebery discussed his work on the Library of America edition of Le Guin’s collected work before focusing in on Always Coming Home and his interest in Le Guin’s writing of the 1980s—between “early” and “late” Le Guin. He used the motif of the “heyiya-if,” or spiral, from this experimental text to establish how Le Guin’s creative and critical work in this period provided a hinge between the reworkings of fantasy tropes with which she was engaged in the early Earthsea books, for example, and her later, more explicitly feminist returns to these fictional worlds. His work on Always Coming Home as the center of the spiral made clear why it was such a popular text at this conference, working as it does to bring pressing political analysis together with the speculative power of fantasy and science fiction.After lunch we returned with the panel “Stages of Life” and a paper from Meghan Cassidy (École Polytechnique) titled “Subjectivity and Childhood in the Earthsea Quartet.” Cassidy focused on The Tombs of Atuan (1971) in her exploration of adolescence, selfhood, and naming in Le Guin’s work. She compared the dissolution of identity experienced by the adolescent with that of the caterpillar that liquefies in its cocoon before becoming a butterfly. This was followed by Patrycja Kurjatto Renard’s (Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale) paper in which she discussed a selection of short stories drawn from Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle as texts that work to redefine fixed conceptions of heterosexuality and kinship structures and to, in what she defined as a Gothic mode, estrange the family from itself.The final panel of the day was simply titled “Utopia” and began with a paper from Dennis Wilson Wise (University of Arizona): “Unrealizable Ambiguous Utopias: Reading The Dispossessed (1974) Through Leo Strauss and Plato.” Wise used Strauss’s reading of Plato’s The Republic as an ambiguous utopia to highlight the ways in which The Dispossessed differs from earlier literary utopias. He placed particular emphasis on the potentially pedagogical function of both texts. The next paper of the panel was given by Joshua Abraham Kopin (University of Texas) and also focused on The Dispossessed. Kopin’s paper provided an exploration of the concept of fidelity in Le Guin’s writing, including both romantic monogamy and a broader understanding of the possibilities engendered by a self-limitation of choice. Finally, in Justin Cosner’s (University of Iowa) paper he read The Lathe of Heaven as a meta-science-fictional text in which Le Guin critiques the moderate inaction of her liberal heroes. He urged us to read the novel’s protagonist along with those who walk away from Omelas as people who have failed to learn how to dream better and to act even on their imperfect desires.Opening the final English-language panel of the conference Julie Phillips read Stephanie Burt’s (Harvard University) paper: “Le Guin’s Mutants, Le Guin’s Gods: X-Men Comics, The Lathe of Heaven, and the Paradoxical Essence of a Superhero Story.” Burt discussed direct references to The Lathe of Heaven in Chris Claremont’s X-Men: Asgardian Wars (1990) before moving to a discussion of the allure and dangers of the “quick fix” offered for structural problems by the image of the superhero. Continuing the panel’s theme—“Transmission and Translation”—Maria Skakuj-Puri (independent) discussed the work of Le Guin’s Polish translator, Stanisław Barańczak. Her paper discussed censorship, Le Guin’s interest in the power of language, and the interesting fact that A Wizard of Earthsea was the only novel Barańczak ever translated. This was followed by a paper from Emily York (James Madison University) that detailed York’s own work “translating” Le Guin for scientists. She emphasized the efficacy of using Le Guin’s short stories to teach engineering students about the ethics of technology before presenting some of her students’ work in which they imagined ethical futures for science. The panel ended with an experimental joint paper from Diégo Antolinos-Basso (Institut d’études politiques de Paris) and Damien A. Bright (University of Chicago), who read each other letters in which they discussed the politics of science studies. Drawing on Le Guin’s critical work Steering the Craft (1998), they figured her as a literary pirate who subverted the tropes of science fiction and literature for her own, more ethically engaged, ends.Friday afternoon featured two panels of French-language papers followed by a final keynote. For sharing their insight into these panels, which my lack of language skills meant I was sadly unable to attend, I thank Héloïse Thomas and David Creuze. The first paper was given by Noémie Moutel (Université de Caen) and discussed Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) as a pedagogical and ecofeminist tool. She stressed the decolonial focus of the ecofeminist collective of which she is a part, “Les Cruel·le·s Truel·le·s,” for whom Le Guin’s work has been transformative. This was followed by a paper from Thierry Drumm (Université Libre de Bruxelles), who also focused on the radical political applications of Le Guin’s fiction. Drumm argued that Le Guin’s subversion of the figure of the hero offers a vision of power from below—drawing on the work of Audre Lorde in order to read Le Guin’s work in conversation with “subaltern writing.”Building on Lorde’s relationship to Le Guin’s work, the next panel was titled “Hors la maison du maître” (“Out of the Master’s House”). This began with a paper from Quentin Dubois (Université Toulouse–Jean Jaurès) that focused on Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1989). Dubois engaged in a critique of the masculinist techno-heroics of much mainstream science fiction and opposed this to Le Guin’s ecofeminist perspective. The final paper of the day was given by Éliane Beaufils (Université Paris 8), which again troubled the figure of the hero in Le Guin’s work. Beaufils applied Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory” to her own interest in performance art—attempting to imagine what theater not driven by linear narratives of hero-driven progress would look like.The conference ended with a keynote speech from renowned philosopher Isabelle Stengers (Université Libre de Bruxelles) in which she advanced an argument for establishing a science-fictional mode of thinking. Moving through a wide selection of Le Guin’s writing, Stengers argued for the value of the imagination in both the sciences and humanities. It is only when we are haunted by those our philosophies inevitably exclude that we can effect change. Le Guin’s science-fictional worlds, Stengers argued, are the worlds we need now—a fitting end to a stimulating and imaginative event.
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