Ursula Le Guin: Short Stories Ursula Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "Sur" lends itself easily to feminist literary criticism. As a fantasy of alternate history about polar exploration, the story tells of nine women arriving at the South Pole over a year before Roald Amundsen's...

Written during separate times of war, Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” and Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” written in 1974, both chillingly demonstrate the concept of the scapegoat. By definition, the...

Written as an allegory for slavery and the way it affects the people who employ it, Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” questions just how much of an impact living in a society has on one’s willingness to act in ways different...

In the short stories "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and "A Party Down at the Square," authors Ursula LeGuin and Ralph Ellison depict desensitized scenes in which communities show an extreme lack of empathy to human beings receiving...

Composers of negative utopic texts utilize their own contexts so that the audiences’ imagination is challenged to recognize flaws of certain governance, religious cultures and the concept of ‘utopia’ itself, subsequently stimulating readers to...

“Goodness restrained has never been a match for badness unrestrained,” writes Umair Haque, contributor to Medium, claiming that being inactively involved in unjustifiable acts is still siding with the tormentor. This claim may be observed in “The...