Speaking of female quest narratives, I had a student this morning present
on an essay on Orson Scott Card's _Ender's Game_ series. The essay used
Otto Rank's concept of the hero monomyth to examine the Card series. Of
course, Card is not really a feminist sf writer, but the concept of the
monomyth is interesting especially since it can be seen as the primary
structure in many quest narratives. In fact, two of the novels I taught
that could be called feminist, Elizabeth Moon's _Sheepfarmer's Daughter_,
and Joan D. Vinge's _The Snow Queen_ do follow this format. The problem of
course is that you could probably reduce all quest narratives to this
formalist theory thus over-simplifying the text. In any case, what do you
all think?
Erik
Erik Tsao
Graduate Student
Department of English
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI
"The naked Senses sometimes see too little -- but then _always_ they see
too much."
--Edgar Allan Poe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:30 PDT