Reference no: EM133302025

Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children's books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA's Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

I love Ursual K. Le Guin's writer's voice. A huge, illustrated, hardback copy of her Earthsea series has a place of honor on my bookshelf. I usually assign one of her short stories for reading when we discuss science fiction; however, this semester, I chose instead to focus on one of her many contributions to discussing fiction. This interview was published in The Paris Review, and in it, Le Guin elaborates on her method of approaching writing, particularly science fiction. What confession about her writing interested you the most?

"Creative Nonfiction"

A common characteristic of the works that fall under the heading creative nonfiction is the opportunity for self-reflection that the genre offers to writers. In all the selections in this cluster, the writers are self-reflexive about the topics they address, and readers witness their struggle against the limitations of language and narrative as tools for articulating their experiences with the world. Granted, other literary genres allow writers similar opportunities for self-reflection: in poetry, the tradition of the ars poetica; in fiction, the artist novel; in drama, meta-theater. Nevertheless, because creative nonfiction begins with the assumption that writers are not merely attempting to depict reality but instead are developing an accurate account of their experience, the stakes are higher-or, at least, different.

This selection is a little background information on the genre of creative nonfiction. The excerpt from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek gives you an idea of creative nonfiction. Tinker Creek is a place that's hard to find on anything but very detailed USGS maps of Virginia. Like Thoreau, who moved a mere mile out of Concord to look closely at life in and around a modest lake that no one had paid much attention to before and detailed his adventure in Walden, Dillard visits this fairly typical Blue Ridge Mountain stream, not far from her home in Radford, to see things that usually go unnoticed. One recourse of a contemporary author writing about the natural environment is to bring something new to the experience: not just to see new places and details but also to bring fresh knowledge to the encounter.

There are "dark" sequences in this chapter, accounts of being outside as the light fades, and Dillard's mood grows darker as well. What does Dillard accomplish here, by taking the observations and tone of her chapter in this direction?

George Saunders

"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" takes a cynical look at the subculture of living history museums, war reenactments, renaissance fairs, or amusement parks, populating it with desperate, pathetic, and broken souls. The name "CivilWarLand" is clearly riffing on the world's most famous amusement park, Disneyland. Is Saunders's critique of living history museums tied to the corporatization of family fun that is embodied by the Disney parks? Or is it a critique of our relationship to history itself? What different versions of the history of the Civil War have you been exposed to, either in school or through other sources: Was it a war about slavery? About states' rights? About federalist power? Americas' relationship to this pivotal moment in the nation's history remains deeply unsettled, and that a work such as Saunders's can help us see that history anew through the funhouse mirror of satire. What are we to make of our narrator being murdered yet continuing to narrate the events of the story? Does this tell us something about how we relate to the ghosts of the past? (Don't try to answer all of these questions in your response. I'm asking them to help you think about the story.)

Tim O'Brien

"How to Tell a True War Story"

You may have read The Things They Carried prior to this class. If you haven't, you should. Like Hemingway, O'Brien has a way of capturing the true impact of war on the human body and, to a larger extent, society. By Vietnam, war--from WWI's artillery horses to the massive tanks battles on the Western front in WWII, the Manhatten Project and Agent Orange--had evolved to mean that sometimes the bodies were never found due to the advancements of technology for mass destruction; sometimes all you had was what the bodies left behind--their things.

Question: How does the fractured nature of this narrative, along with the repetition of the phrase "true war story", help convey O'Brien's message about the subject matter (war and truth)?