New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

Laurence Davis holds a doctoral degree in politics from Oxford University, and has taught political theory at Oxford University and University College Dublin.Peter Stillman is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Vassar College.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is one of the most significant utopian novels in this long tradition of imaginative socio-political thought experiments. In this collection, Davis and Stillman have given us a “sustained and comprehensive” re-examination of this “ambiguous utopia” by way of sixteen astute and original essays. This is a welcome, timely, and important collection.

• Chapter 1 IntroductionPart 2 Open-ended Utopian PoliticsChapter 3 The Dynamic and Revolutionary Utopia of Ursula K. Le GuinChapter 4 Worlds Apart: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Possibility of MethodPart 5 Post-Consumerist PoliticsChapter 6 The Dispossessed as Ecological Political TheoryChapter 7 Ursula K. Le Guin, Herbert Marcuse, and the Fate of Utopia in the PostmodernChapter 8 The Alien Comes Home: Getting Past the Twin Planets of Possession and Austerity in Le Guin's The DispossessedPart 9 Anarchist PoliticsChapter 10 Individual and Community in Le Guin's The DispossessedChapter 11 The Need for Walls: Privacy, Community, and Freedom in The DispossessedChapter 12 Breaching Invisible Walls: Individual Anarchy in The DispossessedPart 13 Temporal PoliticsChapter 14 Time and the Measure of the Political AnimalChapter 15 Fulfillment as a Function of Time, or the Ambiguous Process of UtopiaChapter 16 Science and Politics in The Dispossessed: Le Guin and the "Science Wars"Part 17 Revolutionary PoliticsChapter 18 The Gap in the Wall: Partnership, Physics, and Politics in The DispossessedChapter 19 From Ambiguity to Self-Reflexivity: Revolutionizing Fantasy SpaceChapter 20 Future Conditional or Future Perfect? The Dispossessed and Permanent RevolutionPart 21 Open-ended Utopian PoliticsChapter 22 Ambiguous Choices: Skepticism as a Grounding for UtopiaChapter 23 Empty Hands: Communication, Pluralism and Community in Ursula K. Le Guin's The DispossessedPart 24 A Response, by Ansible, from Tau CetiPart 25 Further Reading