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

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Barad, Karen M. 2008. “Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, 120–154. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2014. “ SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8. The conversations stimulated by these objects and activities were fascinating, informative and insightful, although private to the group who participated so I will not share them here.

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. 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.

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon. 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.) Gough, Noel. 2010. “Performing Imaginative Inquiry: Narrative Experiments and Rhizosemiotic Play.” In Imagination in Educational Theory and Practice: A Many-sided Vision, edited by Thomas William Nielsen, Rob Fitzgerald, and Mark Fettes, 42–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Gough, Noel. 1998. “Reflections and Diffractions: Functions of Fiction in Curriculum Inquiry.” In Curriculum: Toward New Identities, edited by William F. Pinar, 93–127. New York, NY: Garland Publishing Inc. Canby, Vincent. 1991. “Lily Tomlin, Translated From Stage To Screen.” The New York Times, September 27. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9401EFD7123AF934A1575AC0A967958260. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.Wagner, Jane. 2012. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers Inc. Original edition, Original screenplay published in 1986. Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. Donna J. Haraway is the author of the revolutionary 'Cyborg Manifesto' and Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books including most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122.