Communities of the Heart : The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin

This work explores 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. Since we live in a culture that is saturated with the mythic, the author argues that, as Le Guin interprets and reimagines myth in her fiction, the myth becomes rhetorical.

As Le Guin revisions and reinterprets myth in the story she is telling, she also subverts myth - in particular the "Myth of the Hero" and the "Quest" (the Monomyth), and the myth of utopia - as a way of making her argument for the importance of feminist and Native American approaches to our ways of meaning.

Her rhetoric, when placed in historical and sociocultural context, becomes the rhetoric of Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, Whitman, Fuller and Dewey: American romantic/pragmatic rhetoric, a rhetoric that argues that value be given to the subjective, the personal and private, the small and the feminine.