Taoist Ecological Thought In Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand Of Darkness And The Dispossessed

Ursula Le Guin is an excellent American contemporary writer who was called the Queen of feminist science fiction. She is also a novelist who often combines science fiction with postmodernism, relying on science fiction to explore existent problems of human beings and feminist problems. Owing to concerning about female problems, Le Guin together with Virginia Woolf is regarded as"Female Ancestor". Importantly, she is a"female leader"who has made great contribution to the development of science fiction. She has published many works in different genres such as fiction, fantasy, poetry, children's book, essay,criticism and translation. Her works explore Taoist, anarchist, ethnographic, feminist, psychological and sociological themes. So she has been labeled over the years as an"approximately accurate"[2]novelist, radical feminist, Taoist and anarchist. Especially, what she has written in her works always has distinct Taoist features in term of her fascination with Taoism. She has started to study Tao Te Ching since 14 years old and has been translating it for 40 years. Compared with different translations of Tao Te Ching(道德经), she herself translated it into English in 1997. Taoist thought is embodied in her works. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are her best works, both of which made her win the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the top two awards for science fiction. The two works show us elements concerned about Taoism. Just as Nancy Bartends from Charleston Southern University criticized that her typical story involves a hero's quest for maturity and psychological integration, and her major theme is the need for balance and wholeness. (Gale, volume 6)As a female science fiction writer, Le Guin concerns about human survival in the future. Taoist power tells her how to establish a world if human will have a well-being life. Meanwhile, with a sense of hoping to build a balance world, she links Taoism and ecology in her works. She expects to establish a non-dominant, organist world, but she is not certain whether she can realize her dream. Therefore, she puts some opposites elements first and then tries to unify these opposite elements in her works.Based on Taoism and ecology, this thesis is composed of five parts. The first chapter comes to the introduction which aims to introduce briefly Ursula Le Guin, her works and the literature reviews for The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. The second part focuses on Le Guin's cyclic and returning idea of Taoism which is articulated by the structural feature of two works. The third chapter analyzes Le Guin's the yin-yang balance, deconstructing the gender and uniting lightness and darkness. The forth chapter deals with ecological Taoism in Gethenian and Anarresti world, while the fifth chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis.