Un article sur Ursula Le Guin

[jerome]

Voici un article sur Ursula Le Guin en anglais nommé : How Ursula K Le Guin led a generation away from realism

C'est à lire ici

Voici le début :
There's a scene in David Mitchell's coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green, which is easy to miss unless – like yours truly – you have spent much of your life fascinated with the work of Ursula K Le Guin.

Black Swan Green's 13-year-old protagonist, Jason, wanders into the home of a desiccated but still glamorous aristocrat of the old school who offers to tutor him in poetry. "Tell me," she asks, "Who are your teachers … what are the writers you revere most greatly?"

Instead of offering Proust or Rilke, Jason tosses out, "Isaac Asimov. Ursula Le Guin. John Wyndham." (Not exactly what she was looking for.)
"But have you read 'Madame Bovary'?" she shouts. "This is your culture, your inheritance, your skeleton! You are ignorant even of Kafka?"

I love this scene not only for the way it's drawn, but for what it tells us about its author. It illustrates a journey – from the disreputable world of SF and fantasy to what we still call "literary" work – taken by many readers, including me. More important, it expresses a crucial shift that's gone on among the writers born in the 1960s: the movement to claim pop culture – sci-fi, comic books, pulp detective novels – as an influence on par with Flaubert or, in the States, Fitzgerald.