LIT3313 – Spring 2027 – Ballard

When Ursula K. Le Guin began publishing fiction in the 1960s, critics still viewed science fiction and fantasy as "lesser" genres, inferior both aesthetically and philosophically to "serious" literary fiction. By the time of her passing in 2018, both of those genres had come to be viewed as culturally, artistically, and politically significant. Le Guin's role in that transformation was far from incidental: she was a central figure in the "New Wave" that transformed the field of science fiction in the 1960s, made lasting and provocative interventions into the norms of fantasy, and made a career of crafting narratives that probed and expanded the limits of the contemporaneous imagination regardless of the genres in which she wrote. This course offers a sustained exploration of her work across speculative genres, surveying selections from her Earthsea (fantasy) and Hainish (science fiction) cycles as well as standalone work such as The Lathe of Heaven (utopia) and Always Coming Home (post-apocalyptic). Alongside this, we'll read genre criticism (including Le Guin's own contributions to science fiction and fantasy studies), some speculative fiction by Le Guin's interlocutors and literary descendants, and theoretical selections that address the range of concerns that motivated and move through Le Guin's fiction--gender and sexuality; race, ethnicity, and coloniality; science, technology, and environment; politics, economics, and power.
This course fulfills the requirements for FSU: Exploring the Human Experience; English LMC: Understanding Genres.