“ALL WE HAVE IS MEANS”: URSULA K. LE GUIN’S UTOPIANISM AS ONGOINGNESS

• Authors: Shotwell Alexis
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article argues that we can affirm the impulse to change our current course and start over, while rejecting the idea that new beginnings take us out of our social and historical embeddedness. Instead, I propose using Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction and anarchist attention to process and “ongoingness” as a political good. Bringing her novels The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and The Dispossessed (1974) into conversation with contemporary movements for prison abolition, this essay asks how her imperfect utopianism contributes to understandings of political prefiguration, process, and the idea that social transformation must be an ongoing project.

Keywords

EN

UTOPIANISM; ABOLITIONISM; ANARCHISM; ONGOINGNESS; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 3 – 17

Contributors

author

Shotwell Alexis

• Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0494-6202

Identifiers

DOI

10.31577/WLS.2024.16.4.1