Note: This class is open to high school students only.
Celebrate Ursula Le Guin, a great American author who recently passed, by reading the first book, “A Wizard of Earthsea,” in her series, Earthsea.
“The first three Earthsea books … were written, at the request of her publisher, for young adults. But their grand scale and elevated style betray no trace of writing down to an audience.”
Le Guin wrote twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children’s books over the course of her life. She wove cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung into her writings, and contributed deeply to the worlds of science fiction and feminism.
This will be a read-aloud and discussion class. There will also be short writing assignments along the way to dive deeper into the content and themes.
“The rhythmic structure of narrative is both journey-like and architectural,” Le Guin has written. “Great novels offer us not only a series of events, but a place, a landscape of the imagination which we can inhabit and return to. This may be particularly clear in the ‘secondary universe’ of fantasy, where not only the action but the setting is avowedly invented by the author.”
