| The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: to explore the use of imaginative literature as persuasion, focusing on the science fiction and fantasy of Ursula K. Le Guin and her rhetorical use of myth; and to consider the implications of fiction as argument, in particular, how these implications are played out in a composition classroom.; Since we live in a culture that is saturated with the mythic, I argue that as Le Guin reinterprets and reimagines myth in her science fiction and fantasy, the myth becomes rhetorical. As Le Guin revisions and reshapes myth in the story she is telling, she also subverts myth--in particular the Myth of the Hero and the Quest, and the myth of utopia--as a way of making her argument for the importance of feminist and Native American solutions to our ways of making meaning. Her 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. The works of Le Guin that I examine are the Earthsea cycle, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Always Coming Home, Four Ways to Forgiveness, A Fisherman of The Inland Sea, and selected short stories.; To explore the value of using fiction in a composition class, especially to teach argument, I use student writings from two of my composition classes. In each class, science fiction novels and short stories were the primary texts. I draw on such language and composition theorists as Susanne Langer, who explores the symbolic nature of language, Ernst Cassirer and Kenneth Burke who present man as "animal symbolicum," the different uses of language as seen by James Britton, the connections between thought and speech made by Lev Vygotsky, Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm, which defines man as Homo narrans, and Le Guin's own thoughts on myth, fantasy, science fiction, language, and story. In addition, as does Le Guin, I draw on Carl Jung's and Joseph's Campbell's definitions and functions of myth.; I conclude that Le Guin, like Emerson, Peirce, and Thoreau, and like her contemporaries, Freire, Rose, and Coles, is a romantic/pragmatic rhetorician, arguing for what Vico argued for in the 18th century: that knowledge as an integrated whole should be studied as such; and that Cartesian thinking is only part of how humans make meaning. The rational and the irrational, the subjective and the objective are both valid ways of knowing. Story, especially when expressed as myth, is a tool for human understanding as valid and as true as scientific experimentation. Story becomes a powerful teaching tool, and science fiction with its metaphors of the future, science, and technology, is particularly powerful. |
