Ursula K. Le Guin (Kelsey Watt)

Ursula K. Le Guin Episode - The Archive Project Podcast - Literary ...

The child of distinguished anthropologists, Ursula K. Le Guin grew up in an environment that nurtured her intellectual curiosity. Her family lived in California and their summers were spent in Napa Valley where she was able to wander around the vast land. Her father studied Native American Culture which contributed to her mother’s renowned biography about Ishi, the last surviving man of a group of Native American people indigenous of Northern California after which their land was invaded. Le Guin’s personal connection to her natural environment and her parents influence later contributed to her writing career emphasizing many environmental, cultural anthropological, and feminist themes.

Le Guin had a lifelong interest in Taoism, a philosophy that grew from an observance of the natural world, and a religion that believes in cosmic balance. Le Guin’s works often emphasize themes of balance and the importance of interconnectedness across species, genders, and race. This specifically relates to Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest as she represents the forest as a space balanced between lightness and darkness.

In reference to one of her collections of short fiction, Le Guin explained, “Misusing the world, misusing other people, these are permanent problems. Slavery is not a current problem in the United States, but the results of slavery and the mind-set that slavery left us with are. Somehow that was the metaphor I needed. [Freedom] is something I have to write about. What does it mean to be a slave, to be a slave owner? How do you get free? How do you be free? It’s not something someone can give you.” I found this interesting relating to The World for World is lost and how she writes the end of the book for the Athsheans. Learning violence and having to adapt to the world differently due to being oppressed is a very sad fate. Like she states, misusing the world and other peopleare permanent problems but hopefully her writing and other activists can contribute to understanding humanity in beneficial ways.

Articles:

Walker, Charlotte Zoe. “Ursula K. Le Guin (21 October 1929-).” Twentieth-Century American Nature Writers: Prose, edited by Roger Thompson and J. Scott Bryson, vol. 275, Gale, 2003, pp. 155-165. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 275.

Jameson, Sara. “Ursula K. Le Guin: a galaxy of books and laurels.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 242, no. 39, 25 Sept. 1995, p. 32+.

Mary Shelley’s tragedies. (Ksenia Klak)

Mary Shelley was born in 1797 into a family of writers. Her mother was a leading British feminist and her father was a radical philosopher. Mary’s life was accompanied by tragic events. Her mother died soon after Mary’s birth and her father was left alone with two children. Shelley was mainly raised by her stepmother, with whom she did not have a good relationship, since the stepmother was interested in her own children, and as a result, Mary did not receive maternal affection and love, she felt abandoned and unloved, later these feelings Mary reflected in her novel Frankenstein. In her early years, when Mary Shelley was 16, she fell in love with the married poet Percy Shelley and fled with him to France, where she soon experienced unsuccessful motherhood – the death of her newborn daughter, and later she lost her son. Shelley’s failed mothering experience also is placed in her novel Frankenstein in the context when the monster was created by Victor. Undoubtedly, a series of family tragedies in Shelley’s life influenced her writing works.

The Last Man novel is also the result of another tragedy in Mary Shelley’s life when her husband drowned. As Anne K. Mellor states, Mary Shelley wrote the novel “to present idealized portraits of Percy Shelley, first and most tellingly as Adrian in The Last Man”. The biography of Mary Shelley written by Anne K. Mellor emphasizes that mostly Shelley’s works concerned with the failed family relationships, The Adventures of Perkin Warbeck; Lodore; Falkner. In these novels she continued to explore the themes that had long obsessed her, relationships between fathers and daughters, and dependence on their fathers. It is interesting and at the same time sad to realize that the tragic events in Mary Shelley’s life are in fact the emotional pain that she expressed through her novels.

Sources:

Anne K. Mellor, British Writers, Supplement 3, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996

Luca Prono, Encyclopedia of Motherhood (Vol. 3. ), Sage Publications, Inc., 2010 

Mary Shelley, Albert Shilman

Mary Shelley is very best known for her science fiction novel of Frankenstein which was written in the early 1800s. However, her personal life and the issues she faced in society at the time are not widespread despite the major impact it had on her professional writing career. Mary Shelley, Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was largely overshadowed by her poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. At age 16 Mary had fallen in love with one of her father’s 21-year-old protege’s. Percy had been married at the time and had an affair with his wife and had abandoned her when he impregnated Mary and run off to Europe. Her father disapproved of the relationship and refused to communicate with his daughter for two years. Mary had given premature birth to her first daughter Clara in 1815 who would die two weeks later. However, a year later she would have a successful birth of her son William. Mary would again try for daughter in 1817 which she named Clara. Following the faith of Clara before her, she would die just after her first birthday and the demise of William would come the same year. The death of all three of her children was intriguing as Mary would try again for the fourth time and coming away with successful childbirth to Percy in 1819. An interesting fact that was mentioned is that at the time of publication of Frankenstein the author was unknown. The first edition of Frankenstein had a preface by Percy Shelley, causing some to believe he in fact had written the book. Could this have been done on purpose to hide the fact that the work was written by a woman to gain more publicity? What is most intriguing is that Mary would continue to write novels under the alias of “Writer of Frankenstein” after the loss of her husband Percy in a boating incident in 1822. Mary decided to support herself and her son by writing more novels. Percy Shelley’s father, Thomas Shelley, would offer his financial support for Mary and her son but would threaten to cut her off if she had published any more of his son’s unpublished poems. Mary’s intention for publishing her late husband’s poems was to salvage his legacy and to try to write anew. What I found most interesting is that “In 1838 he finally gave Mary permission to publish her husband’s poems, as long as no memoir of Percy’s scandalous life was included.” Thomas Shelley wanted to hide his son’s antic lifestyle to preserve his family’s reputation. Mary would work around this by including a preface and biographical notes to the poems. Mary Shelley would then continue to write more novels and poems until her death in 1851 at her london home. 

The Life of Ursula K. Le Guin (Jasper Wen)

The Subversive Imagination of Ursula K. Le Guin | The New Yorker

Ursula K. Le Guin is a science fiction author who published and edited around eighty books over seven decades. She started writing poetry at the age of five and spent every summer at her family’s second home in Napa Valley, a forty-acre rural property in which Walker states that it may have “contributed to her emphasis on environmental themes in her writing”. Le Guin’s father was an anthropologist who studied Native American cultures which may have contributed to the creation of the Athsheans in “The Word for World is Forest” as the Athsheans is a great allegory to the Native Americans in the real world. Her mother was also a psychologist and writer and influenced Le Guin in terms of writing and feminism. Because of the environment and family she was raised in, Le Guin excelled in academics and graduated with an BA in French literature and Italian literature from Radcliffe College and an MA in Renaissance History at Columbia University. After marrying Charles Le Guin, a scholar in French history, and bearing two daughters and a son, the family settled in Portland, Oregon, where Le Guin initiated her writing career and lived the rest of her life until her death in 2018.

Le Guin introduced the Hainish universe through her novels as a way to parallel real-life themes and issues to a science fantasy universe that embraces them. Most of her works address gender roles and race issues, but each individual work is unique as she diversifies the target audience for children and adults and focuses on current events. For example, “The Word for World is Forest” addressed anti-war themes which was relevant at the time because the Vietnam War was also occurring. “The Left Hand of Darkness” was a novel that had no fixed genders, which emphasized her views on gender roles and feminism. “A Wizard of Earthsea” is a part of a  series of novels that focused on the coming-of-age theme and the concepts of Taoism, in which Le Guin had an early interest on in her childhood. Le Guin’s diversified portfolio of novels and poems earned her many awards and widespread critical reception praising her works and her analysis on current issues and events.

Bibliography

Walker, Charlotte Zoe. “Le Guin, Ursula K. (1929-2018), An Introduction to.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jennifer Stock, vol. 457, Gale, 2020, pp. 83-85. Gale Literature, https://link-gale-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/AWAOPK491298754/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=36d88ae5. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.

“Ursula K. Le Guin.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 310, Gale, 2011. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link-gale-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/H1103180000/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=6f41b444. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.

“Ursula K. Le Guin.” Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed., vol. 18, Gale, 2004, pp. 249-251. Gale eBooks, https://link-gale-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CX3404707210/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=64de36ea. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.

William Shakespeare, Cynthia Cohen

            William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor of the Renaissance era.

Shakespeare was the third child of John Shakespeare, a leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a local landed heiress. Shakespeare had two older sisters, Joan and Judith, and three younger brothers, Gilbert, Richard and Edmund. Before Shakespeare’s birth, his father became a successful merchant and held official positions as alderman and bailiff, an office resembling a mayor. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582 in Worcester. They had three children, Susanna Hamnet and Judith, but Hamnet later died of unknown causes at age 11. There are seven years of Shakespeare’s life where no records exist in which scholars call this period the “lost years,” and there is wide speculation on what he was doing during this period. By the early 1590s, documents show Shakespeare was a managing partner in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an acting company in London with which he was connected for most of his career.  The company soon changed its name to the King’s Men following the crowning of King James I in 1603. The King’s Men company was very popular. Records show that Shakespeare had works published and sold as popular literature. Shakespeare wrote more than thirty plays which were each divided into four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. His earliest plays were primarily comedies and histories such as Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors,and later switched to tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet. Some of his best plays in which he is known for is plays for are Julius Caesar, Hamlet and MacBeth. In his final years, Shakespeare turned to the romantic with Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.

Sometime after 1612, Shakespeare retired from the stage and returned to his home in Stratford and passed away on 23, 1616. One thing that I found most interesting about Shakespeare was the fact that he has absolutely no records for 7 years. Nobody knows what happened to him or what shaped him which makes him seem mysterious and gives us  sense that we don’t know the full story to him. This sense of mystery as to what his life entails and intrigues the reader. Whatever happened in those 7  years very much shaped him into the amazing writer that he is. Another thing I found very interesting was the broad categories in which he wrote his plays.During his lifetime, Shakespeare wrote histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. To me this is very impressive and shows what an amazing writer Shakespeare is.

Information source:

“Shakespeare, William 1564–1616 English Writer.” Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students, edited by Paul F. Grendler, vol. 4, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004, pp. 83-89. Gale eBooks,

Leslie Marmon Silko, Katelyn Borello

  • The author I chose to research for our final presentation is Leslie Marmon Silko.  I read two articles that touched upon her work and life: one being an article written by K. Wesley Berry from the University of Mississippi, published in 2000 and another called “There are Balances and Harmonies Always Shifting; Always Necessary to Maintain” published in 2005.
  • Silko’s nationality is quite mixed, being Laguna, Mexican, and White. Growing up in her New Mexican childhood, religion was very diverse as she grew up worshipping both traditional Pueblo mythology and Christianity. Silko’s grandmother taught her about the Mother Creators who brought the universe into being, while also hearing Bible stories as well. The spirituality expressed in Silko’s writings is of an “earth-centered bent.” In her essay, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,” she discusses animism in Pueblo religion, especially when she states in the essay, “The ancient Pueblo people called the earth the Mother Creator of all things in this world. . . . Rocks and clay are part of the Mother. . . . A rock has being or spirit, although we may not understand it. The spirit may differ from the spirit we know in animals or plants or in our selves. In the end we all originate from the depths of the earth.”
  • Silko expresses her vision of environmental justice in a very traditional co-creative storytelling way. She does this through all of her written pieces, like “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination” and other pieces of hers, like “Ceremony” and “Storyteller.”
  • Silko and her Pueblo family suffered from numerous flooding and droughts throughout her childhood, expressing the frustration through her work and emphasizing that natural terrors of human life are very much the result of human action.
  • In many of Silko’s stories, her dad is the one actually taking the photographs that are placed within the story, showing the ancient Laguna culture. What is fascinating is Silko and her father have no relationship to these people, as they are just strangers in the world. They do this to leave it completely open to their viewers’ and readers’ to create and interpretive their own thoughts and ideas.

Articles

Berry, K. Wesley. “Leslie Marmon Silkoand Wendell Berry: Regionalisms for Ecological Work and Worship.” Organization & Environment, vol. 13, no. 3, Sept. 2000, pp. 338–353, doi:10.1177/1086026600133007.

De Ramírez, Susan Berry Brill, and Edith M. Baker. “‘There Are Balances and Harmonies Always Shifting; Always Necessary to Maintain’: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Vision of Global Environmental Justice for the People and the Land.” Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 2, June 2005, pp. 213–228, doi:10.1177/1086026604271941.

The Life Of Shakespeare by Nancy Carrion

Born in Central England in 1564, English playwright William Shakespeare, was later known to be one of the greatest writers who has ever lived. Growing up, William Shakespeare have attended the King’s New School in Stratford, which emphasized the study of Latin. This school inspired Shakespeare to read works of ancient Roman authors which had influenced several of Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare’s works came in a variety of different genres since he wasn’t afraid to experiment with different stories and tones. Shakespeare wrote plays about comedy, history, tragedies, romances, “problem plays” (mix of comedy and tragedy), and he even based some of his plays on his own life experiences. “The first is his friendship with a young man, whose forgetfulness and ungratefulness are a source of pain for the author. The other is a love-hate affair with a mysterious woman known as the Dark Lady, who is as unfaithful to the poet as she is to her own husband”.

One of the many reasons why Shakespeare was considered so skilled was because of his ability to portray every possible emotional state. The emotions utilized in his plays highlight the elements of human life being that of love, friendship, growing old, and the approach of death. Shakespeare taps into his own humanity by including in his poems, the emotions that he has faced such as jealousy of other writers, concerns about aging, desire for fame, and fear of losing his talent.

Human emotions play a huge role in his plays and this is obvious in “The Tempest” because of how we are aware of Prospero’s need for revenge, Caliban’s greed for power, and Ariel’s desire for freedom. The way in which the emotional state of Prospero changes from wanting his enemies to suffer at the beginning of “The Tempest” to forgiving his enemies and accepting virtue over vengeance at the end, creates a sense of emotional growth. The display of emotional growth allows Shakespeare to portray every possible emotional state and use it to appeal to our humanity.

Works Cited:

“Shakespeare, William 1564–1616 English Writer.” Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students, edited by Paul F. Grendler, vol. 4, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004, pp. 83-89. Gale eBooks,

https://link-gale com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CX3409200427/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=1f7ec3e5. Accessed 13 Aug. 2020.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s Life

Sarah Orne Jewett was a regional writer meaning she writes in her own particular time and area. She spent most of her time in the rugged Maine coast where she does most of her writing. Sarah was one of 3 daughters and was born in Sept 3 of 1948 to an aristocratic family. It’s uncommon for women in the 19th century to be well-educated but both her parents were readers and wanted their 3 daughters to be well-educated. Sarah wanted to become a physician like her father but was unable to achieve that because due to her poor health and instead she turned to writing. Sarah loved following her father around during his rounds as a physician and loved listening to him talk about books and ideas. She published her first short story “Deephave”, a melodramatic tale of love which later led to her true calling: “writing honestly and simply about the richness and poignancy of the common folk of Maine.” Sarah wove feminism with environmental literature, drawing inspiration from the women of Maine. According to Perry D. Westbrook, “The women especially (and most of Jewett’s strong characters are women) had learned to live in harmony with their native region—a rocky, island-studded coast with steep pastures and forested mountains rising close back from the water. The most notable of these women, the widow Almira Todd, subsisted as a herbalist, thus personifying the Maine folks’ ability to draw life-giving strength from a seemingly sterile land.” Also major tribute to the people of Maine as Sarah would say, “these quiet, resourceful, hard-working people, the significance of whose lives, now that the adventurous seafaring days were gone, Jewett found to be in the success with which they had adjusted to a harsh environment.”


After her father’s death, she began a very close relationship with a woman named Annie Fields whom was a wife to the publisher James Fields. After his death, Annie and Sarah’s relationship grew closer and formed what is known as a “Boston marriage” which pretty much was gay marriage in today’s world but during the 19th century homosexuality was considered taboo. Due to her relationship with a woman, it changes the story of the “White Heron,” it wasn’t just man against nature, it was also man against woman. The ornithologist wanted to capture a rare bird as part of his conquest, while Sylvie a girl, like a white heron, sought refuge, away from the likes of this man and the business of the city. It was later the story was rejected by the Atlantic Monthly as it was too sentimental.

Sarah then continued on her writing and wrote “The country of the pointed Firs” (1896) novel which then later solidified her career and reputation as the century’s greatest regional writer with more than 150 stories and 4 novels published. Sadly, she gave up as a writer in 1902 after a carriage accident and instead she continued to devote her remaining years to her companion Annie Fields.

Sources Used: “Sarah Orne Jewett.” LitFinder Contemporary Collection, Gale, 2007. Gale Literature: LitFinder, https://link-gale-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/LTF0000035391BI/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=82929a23. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.

Westbrook, Perry D. “Sarah Orne Jewett: Overview.” Reference Guide to American Literature, edited by Jim Kamp, 3rd ed., St. James Press, 1994. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link-gale-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/H1420004364/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=975e67fb. Accessed 13 Aug. 2020.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s Life by Stephanie Ohler

The author I chose to research  for our final presentation is Sarah Orne Jewett.  I read two articles about her life: one from LitFinder Contemporary Collection, published in 2007 and another called “Feminist Writers”, published in 1996.

-She was born and died in a small town along the rugged coast of Maine called South Berwick.  This is relevant because her rural upbringing had a lot of influence in her love of nature and a lot of her work was set in Coastal Maine.  It’s also important to note where she was born because she was considered a “regional” writer, meaning her writing portrayed a  specific geographic region’s people, scenery and customs authentically.

-In a letter to a friend, Jewett wrote: “I determined to teach the world that country people were not the awkward, ignorant set those people seemed to think. I wanted the world to know their grand, simple lives; and, so far as I had a mission, when I first began to write, I think that was it.”  I think “A White Heron” definitely embodies that statement.  She uses her story to show what a wonderful life young Sylvia has in the countryside, with her birds and trees.  Although it’s a simple life, Sylvia is happiest there.

–The short story we read for class, “A White Heron,” was first rejected by the Atlantic Monthly for being “too sentimental” but it was later published in a whole collection of short stories.

-She had a “Boston marriage” with her lifelong friend, Annie Fields(after the death of Annie Field’s husband, James).  I only mention this because it was probably quite unusual in the late 1800’s.  It is also relevant because one of Jewett’s books(The Country Doctor) is about a woman who wants to pursue a career in medicine and refuses to marry, even though she is in love.  The character in the story wants to focus on her goals and sees marriage as incompatible with that, much like Jewett herself.

ARTICLES 
Sarah Orne Jewett.” LitFinder Contemporary Collection, Gale, 2007. Gale Literature: LitFinder, https://link-gale-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/LTF0000035391BI/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=82929a23. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.

“Sarah Orne Jewett.” Feminist Writers, edited by Pamela Kester-Shelton, St. James Press, 1996. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link-gale-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/K2410000142/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=d554e333. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.

Leslie Marmon Silko- Jareefah Masna

Leslie Marmon Silko is a Laguna Pueblo Indian woman, and an American novelist. One interesting fact I learned about her was that she admits that she prefers to write about male protagonists in her novels because, according to her, whenever she writes about females, she always projects herself into the character, which she feels hinders her storytelling. I thought this was interesting because we talked a lot of the western masculine “hero” during class, and here is a woman who is not only a role model for Native Americans who finally have someone uplifting their voices, but also a role model by being a woman author. Her explanation is extremely interesting considering the fact that she was raised with a culture that is different from ours. Whereas we are living in a patriarchal society, Silko grew up in a matriarchy. She describes it this way: “in a matriarchy the young man symbolizes purity and virginity–and also the intellectual, the sterile, and the orderly. The female principle was the chaotic, the creative, the fertile, the powerful.” She also says, “In the Pueblo, women crack dirty jokes to men who aren’t their husbands or close relatives. There’s a lot of banter, and a real feeling of equality and strength within the community. There weren’t places where a little girl was told, “Oh, you can’t go there!,” or things of which a little boy was told, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that!” I wasn’t told that because I was a little girl, I had to dress or act a certain way. So for a long time, although I didn’t think I was really a boy, I kind of… didn’t learn not to identify with men.” All of the books we’ve read this summer had male protagonists, and I think it is interesting to note that 2 out of 3 of the authors have been female, and they were feminists, and Silko’s perspective can help shape our own outlook on these novels and their heroes. We, as a class, have come to the conclusion that Mary Shelley’s depiction of Victor was not as the traditional protagonist, and Le Guin wrote Don Davidson to bash the masculine hero trope, and so Silko’s views on the binary between men and women can help our own understanding of our prejudices and biases, as well as help deepen our comprehension of the novels we’ve read this month.

I got my information from a transcript of Florence Boos’ “An interview with Leslie Marmon Silko.” from 1997.