Book Description

Summary: This project is a discussion of the way in which the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin highlights the role of consent in metaphor, an act that decenters the experiential relationship with the world as source of metaphorical interactions, and highlights the role of metaphor in accessing the unmeasurable, and the unknown. A combination of Le Guin's complex system of metaphor and Paul Ricoeur's work in both metaphor and the composition of acts of will delineates the structures and resultant uses of metaphor both in literature and the world. Within the structures outlined in this work, metaphor falls into four categories determined by where, when, and by whom consent is offered: living metaphor, metaphorized words, effaced metaphor, and determinative metaphor. These structures indicate the uses and misuses of metaphor within social and political dynamics, as well as offering an illustration of how metaphor allows for the expansion into the unknown. The following text is constructed in four chapters, each of which address four different interactions using four of Le Guin's science fiction novels and one of her novellas. The chapters and subjects are as follows: the unknown in The Left Hand of Darkness; governance in The Dispossessed; the Other in The Eye of the Heron, "A Woman's Liberation," and The Left Hand of Darkness; creation in The Telling. Le Guin's relationship with respectful interaction places the author in a position that allows for a clear conception of how consent is productive in metaphor through each of four styles of metaphor - living, metaphorized word, effaced, and determinative - interactions with those varieties of consent: informed, historical, borrowed, or manufactured. As well, Le Guin's work follows through to suggest the results of the use of each of the different styles of metaphor in either an expansion of the world of the recipient or the repression of referent of the metaphor.