![]() ![]() ![]() The novel opens outward to the Reader, with uncertainty and flux characterizing the reading experience. Textually, Le Guin strikes a balance between opening and closing the text. More specifically, Le Guin imagines new ways of being in the world by using Taoist paradox and contradiction to guide the Reader down a new path, weaves in Kropotkin’s anarchism to re-work how society functions and labors, and, although she did not call her suggestions feminist, performs feminist politics to re-relate the individual to institutions, identities, and places. The Dispossessed features a society informed by Taoist principles, anarcho-syndicalist organization, and open and changing relational structures. With the novel’s textual structure, ideological underpinnings, and imagined worlds, Le Guin teaches the Reader ways to change the world, and through rhetorical criticism, I explore how rhetoric, anarchism, and feminism articulate possibilities for socio-political transformation in her novel. Le Guin offers the Reader of The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia a utopian vision that balances flux with stability. In this dissertation, I argue that Ursula K. Thomas Walter Benson, Committee Chair/Co-Chair Keywords: Matthew Paul Mcallister, Committee Member ![]() Thomas Walter Benson, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor ![]()
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