The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Terra Ignota): 1

Product Information

Simondon, Gilbert. 1995. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Grenoble, France: Editions Jérôme Millon.

Reid, William A. 1981. “The Deliberative Approach to the Study of the Curriculum and Its Relation to Critical Pluralism.” In Rethinking Curriculum Studies: A Radical Approach, edited by Martin Lawn and Len Barton. New York, NY: Routledge.

We will not “beat” climate change, nor is “nature” our adversary. If the planet could be considered a container for all life, in which everything — plants, animals, humans — are all held together, then to attempt domination becomes a self-defeating act. By letting ourselves “become part of the killer story,” writes Le Guin, “we may get finished along with it.” All of which is to say: we have to abandon the old story. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. 1st ed. New York, NY: Grove Press. Ursula K. Le Guin was a celebrated and beloved author of science-fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children's books. Her ground-breaking works, including the Earthsea Trilogy and the Left Hand of Darkness, were enormously influential and drew on cultural anthropology, feminism and Taoism among other themes.

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.it's possible to read this essay in a gender essentialist way (the phallic spear! the phallic club!), but i don't think that's the major drive. le guin's point isn't War Is For Men Gathering Is For Women; her point is that placing all narratives, all human stories, in the language of war is a very narrow definition doing us more harm than good. i also just really like this as a craft thought as much as a human-philosophy thought; her novel Lavinia is a bit of a meandering one, without a rising-action-to-climax-to-falling-action type of plot structure, and it's a much more honest (and, to me, interesting) book for that. (i'm rereading this essay because lavinia had me thinking of it incessantly--something about the way le guin explores at the "woman's side" of the aeneid, a poem that is [among other things] very much about war and imperialism, feels like this essay made manifest. you could illustrate this essay, i think, with the image in that book of ascanius showing other men his father's shield, describing the battles it has seen and the battles it foretells, and lavinia crossing the courtyard as he does so, carrying her child on her shoulder the way aeneas carries that shield.)

Canby, Vincent. 1991. “Lily Tomlin, Translated From Stage To Screen.” The New York Times, September 27. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9401EFD7123AF934A1575AC0A967958260.Paul, Anne Murphy. 2012. “Your Brain on Fiction.” The New York Times. Accessed March 20, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html. The generative potential of storytelling is especially pronounced in speculative fiction, a genre that mines our current reality as raw material for imaginary worldbuilding (this includes things like sci-fi, fantasy and horror). The genre’s patron saint, Ursula Le Guin, died last year aged 88, but she left behind her a breathtaking legacy of fiercely intelligent books and short stories imbued with her own anarcho-feminist, anticolonial politics. One of her best-known novels, The Dispossessed, imagines a small, separatist planet administered according to anarcho-syndicalist principles, what she subtitles an “ambiguous utopia” full of contradictions and complexity. On the planet Anarres, prison does not exist, work is voluntary, any claim to ownership is dismissed as “propertarian”— yet, despite all this, greed and power can still take hold. It feels like a book of thinking aloud, in which Le Guin is trying to figure out different realities through writing. It speaks to the kind of writer Le Guin was: generous and open minded, investigative and bursting with ideas, willing to be wrong, yet always reaching for a world free from harm. Desde las cavernas venimos contando el relato del Héroe, de ese cazador de mamuts y de todas las emocionantes historias que traía para compartir en cada regreso. “Antes de que te des cuenta, los hombres y las mujeres en el campo de avena salvaje y sus hijos e hijas y las habilidades de quienes construyen y los pensamientos de quienes piensan y las canciones de quienes cantan forman parte de aquel relato, fueron puestos al servicio del cuento del Héroe. Pero este no es su relato. Es el de él” (29). Y pienso, de qué forma la civilización, cultura, sociedad que armamos gira en torno a este héroe y sus hazañas, y con ello a su capacidad por encima del resto. Harta de las idolatrías. She explains that in perpetuating the tradition of telling stories in a linear way we miss out so much ‘stuff’, parts of the story that don’t fit the ordained narrative perhaps or aspects of ourselves or experiences that aren’t seen as relevant to the story we are writing. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Næss, Arne. 2005. “Creativity and Gestalt Thinking.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, edited by Harold Glasser and Alan R. Drengson. The Netherlands: Springer. Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122. Berman, Morris. 2000. Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. I came here after reading this one quote below and I am still trying to process the essay. Authors really give us strange, unusual perspectives which once we read seem so obvious. This essay is the kind that needs to be read again and again and would probably keep adding meaning to itself and for me as time passes. The students who signed up were asked to find 3 objects which were somehow related to their research or to the experience of doing their doctorate, put them in a bag and bring them to the online pop-up session. These objects could be linked in practical ways (eg a coffee cup used every day), academically (a favourite book) or for more esoteric reasons related to reflections, memories, dreams, conversations or experiences that were meaningful to them even if tangential to the actual business of writing a doctorate.