Tag Archives: Ursula K Le Guin

Lit Heals By Keeping Us Off Balance

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2024

Different literary techniques have been used over the centuries to keep us on our toes.

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What To Make of a Diminished Biles

By Robin Bates | Published: August 6, 2021

For Simone Biles’s fall from Olympic heights, two Robert Frost poems and Le Guin’s Earthsea Tetralogy bring some needed perspective.

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Mrs. Dalloway and the Gift of Aging

By Robin Bates | Published: February 28, 2019

Friday My wife Julia alerted me to a luminescent Atlantic article about women disappearing as they grow older. Although some regard this as a problem, author Akiko Busch draws on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to show how women can turn it to their advantage. First, the apparent problem. When women are treated as objects, they […]

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Happiness Based on Another’s Oppression

By Robin Bates | Published: April 3, 2018

To understand why the race card is so politically effective, reading Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

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Le Guin: To Refuse Death Is To Refuse Life

By Robin Bates | Published: January 24, 2018

When Ursula K. Le Guin died yesterday, I thought of the “Farthest Shore,” the young adult novel where she grapples with humans’ fear of death.

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Hoping against Hope in the Face of Death

By Robin Bates | Published: February 25, 2015

Following philosopher Adrienne Martin, I meditate on what it means to “hope against hope” or to have “unimaginable hope.” The texts I use are “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” “Beowulf,” and “Wizard of Earthsea.”

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