Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

This book explores the use of imaginative literature as persuasion, focusing on the science fiction of Ursula Le Guin and her rhetorical use of myth. The author concludes that Le Guin (like Emerson, Peirce, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dewey) is a romantic/pragmatic rhetorician. In that sense, she is arguing for what Vico argued for in the eighteenth century: that knowledge should be seen and studied as an integrated whole, and that Cartesian thinking is only part of how humans make meaning.