Communities of the heart

"We live in a society that believes itself to be rational - scientific and quantifiable. Yet at the same time we live in a culture that is saturated with the mythic. We speak of life as a journey; we are all heroes on our own quests. We seek the fantastic, the princess in the castle, the wizard peering into a crystal bowl. We tell fantastic stories of our technological age - of space ships, other worlds, aliens. And we tell the same stories - in myth, in fantasy, in science fiction. Or do we? Ursula K. Le Guin would answer yes and no. We do tell the same stories, to better and more fully understand what it means to be human, and yet we reinterpret, reimagine these stories, so that they reflect our contemporary world. In Communities of the Heart Warren Rochelle examines Le Guin's reimagining of myth and how such reimagining becomes rhetorical. Through story, through myth, through science fiction and fantasy, he argues, Le Guin takes us into her communities of the heart, communities that are truly human." "Le Guin's rhetoric, when placed in historical and sociocultural context, becomes the rhetoric of Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, and Dewey: American romantic/pragmatic rhetoric - a rhetoric that argues for value to be given to the subjective, the personal and private, the small, and the feminine. Rochelle studies Le Guin's Earthsea cycle, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Always Coming Home, Four Ways to Forgiveness, A Fisherman of The Inland Sea, two recent novellas, Dragonfly and Old Music and the Slave Women, and selected short stories. The theorists of language, culture and myth discussed include Susanne Langer, Kenneth Burke, Lev Vygotsky, Walter Fisher, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell."--Jacket.