The Utopian Thought In Ursula Le Guin’s Science Fiction

Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed has a kind of milestone significance in the history of utopian writing.In this book,she imagined two sister stars called Urras and Anarres.Le Guin regarded a country named A-Io on the Urras as a model of capitalist society to reveal the disadvantages such as financial disparity and resources wasting in Capitalist societies,and tried to explore the possible direction of capitalist.Meanwhile,Le Guin regarded Anarres as a typical Anarchist society to uncover the potential troubles such as abusing of power and social rigidities in Anarchist societies.The protagonist Shevek,a physicist who understand the two stars,observe these two societies as a third person and find that each of them has advantages and disadvantages.He reveals an ideal development direction through estimate their good and bad.The ideal development direction is to communicate sincerely,to bridge differences,to learn from each other and to continuously change to create a better world.I try to analyze the genre value and ideological value in Le Guin’s utopian exploration by three means.Firstly,analyzing this novel’s innovation in literature types.Secondly,teasing the source of Le Guin’s utopian thought.Lastly,embodying the utopian character in The dispossessed.The main part of this thesis is divided into three chapters:The first chapter mainly teases the history of utopian writing.Through comparing three concepts ‘utopia literature’ ‘anti-utopia novel’ and ‘utopia novel’,it could be pointed out that Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was reform the traditional utopia literature in genre.By analyzing the typical images of utopia in literature I point out that Le Guin had contentedly inherit and subvert the traditional utopia image.Finally,I establish Le Guin’s epoch-making position in the history of utopian writing.The second chapter identifies the resources of Le Guin’s thoughts.I analyzed that Le Guin learned a lot from Friedrich Hegel and the Anarchist theories which were influenced by Hegel,and that Hegel’s thinking about being and becoming means a lot to Le Guin’s dynamic and critical utopian imagination.I also analyzed that Yin and Yang of Taoism enlightened Le Guin to create a new type of utopia.Lastly,I analyzed the ideological significance that the philosophy of science and the view of truth exerted to Le Guin’s utopian imagination.The third chapter elaborates the feature of the utopian world in the novel.Firstly,I analyzed the eco-utopia in three aspects: resource recycling and utilization,ecological beauty and spiritual richness,ecological maintenance and species survival strategy.Secondly,I analyzed the social utopian ideal that the novel conveys from two aspects: consumerism and asceticism,overturning the wall that creates misunderstanding.