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Zakarya Bezdoode

Zakarya Bezdoode

Academic rank: Associate Professor
ORCID:
Education: PhD.
ScopusId: 2315
Faculty: Faculty of Language and Literature
Address: Faculty of Language and Literature
Phone: داخلی 2475

Research

Title
Critical Utopia: Indirect Political Authority in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed
Type
Thesis
Keywords
Le Guin, Utopia, Dystopia, Critical Utopia, Tom Moylan, Authority
Year
2019
Researchers Narges Khaledian(Student)، Zakarya Bezdoode(PrimaryAdvisor)

Abstract

The present study is a reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and “The Day before the Revolution” in terms of Tom Moylan’s notion of “critical utopia.” Through analysis of Le Guin’s treatment of Utopia in Hainish Cycle, the study raises several questions regarding the purpose of the author in creating Utopia and critical reading of socio-political American society. The aim of this study is to examine whether Le Guin’s novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, are examples of critical Utopias and what Le Guin’s wants to criticize in her societies. The results of the study show that Le Guin’s main project in her Hainish Cycle selected works has been to show that her utopian societies are critical utopias that criticize both her own society and the fictional ones which follow the Utopian tradition in Sci-Fi novels. As far as the study focuses on political systems in Gethen, Anarres and Urras, there are both Utopian and Dystopian zones in the novels that reveal at first the societies seem as a utopia, but they are under a kind of indirect authoritarian power which take their freedom. She also attempts to indicate that she is in search of communication and integrity of nations with each other.