17 private links
The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions--and snares--of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this wide-ranging, international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed. The book concludes with an essay by Le Guin written specially for this volume, in which she reassesses the novel in light of the development of her own thinking over the past 30 years.
"Perhaps I can express my gratitude best by saying that reading [these essays] left me knowing far better than I knew before how I wrote the book and why I wrote it as I did . They have restored the book to me as I conceived it, not as an exposition of ideas but as an embodiment of idea - a revolutionary artifact, a work containing a potential permanent source of renewal of thought and perception, like a William Morris design, or the Bernard Maybeck house I grew up in . This is criticism as I first knew it, serious, responsive, and jargon-free. I honor it as an invaluable aid to reading, my own text as well as others."
-Ursula K. Le Guin, from the Response
