“Permanent Revolution” to Effect an Ever-Evasive (Ecological) Utopia in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Abstract

This article aims to analyse Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia from an ecological perspective. In her ecologically conscious story, Le Guin explores the (ironic) manifestation and repercussions of humanity’s environmental fear, the virtues and ills of an ever-evasive ecological utopian society that is paradoxically informed by eco-friendly and ecophobic propensities in its pursuit of freedom through the vigorous practice of the art of dispossession, and the possibility of transcending the hyper-separated categories of difference that include the human/non-human dichotomy. What Le Guin seeks in her fictional effort above all is a permanent revolution advocating a never-ending diligent and earnest endeavour to effect an improved, preferable society with a revised awareness of its relations to its human and non-human Others, free from the ethic of exploitation rather than a promotion of an already achieved perfect state.