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- Title
CHAPTER: "Yet the old woman will not sleep": Reading Motherhood in Ursula K. Le Guin's Writings.
- Authors
Byrne, Deirdre C.
- Abstract
This chapter explores well-known fabulist Ursula K. Le Guin's writing about mothers. Le Guin is celebrated for her science fiction and fantasy, but her poetry is comparatively neglected. In order to remedy this situation, the chapter examines both fiction and poetry, with greater focus on the latter. Julia Kristeva's theory on mothers' role in children's language acquisition and subject formation as well as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's matrixial theory are employed to illuminate the ambivalence towards mothers in Le Guin's creative work. While Le Guin often portrays mothers as deficient in emotional presence, particularly in her fiction, her poetry contains traces of a matrixial relationship in which the material, as embodied touch, brings mother and daughter closer together than can be explained through a constructionist model alone.
- Subjects
SOCIAL constructionism; SOCIAL psychology; SOCIAL processes; MATERIALISM; SOCIAL integration
- Publication
Value Inquiry Book Series, 2020, Vol 358, p54
- ISSN
0929-8436
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1163/9789004441460_005