By CLAIRE WINTER
A new exhibit, “Le Guin at Beloit,” was given its grand opening on November 19 on Morse Library’s second floor.
The exhibit’s faculty advisor and director, Dr. Tamara Ketabgian, and her community class for the semester, Science Fiction and Speculative Writing, created the exhibit to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Le Guin’s classic science fiction novel, “The Dispossessed.” The exhibit, while centered around “The Dispossessed”- as evidenced by the many different copies of Le Guin’s novel found in the exhibit, each with varying cover art and in differing sizes- also is a representation of Ursula Le Guin’s time as the Mackey Chair of Creative Writing at Beloit College.
In a departure from previous years, some students in the class were employed directly to create the exhibit to create placards and focus pieces for the exhibit. Other students provided research and analysis on the novel. Students also had the opportunity to travel to local schools to teach high school students “The Dispossessed” as a classic novel.
The exhibit, alongside showcasing ”The Dispossessed” as a classic work of Le Guin’s, also emphasizes many of the topics Le Guin touched on during her time in Beloit- comments on student work, newspaper clippings about her whereabouts, and poems she wrote or read are all also on display. “[There’s] interesting archival materials about Le Guin…what kind of teacher she was, her comments on student papers…and peculiar, kind of cult lore about her when she was here,” says Ketabgian, professor and Chair of Humanities at Beloit College. “My students from the exhibit researched this and retrieved the wooden woman, actually, from Springfield, Illinois.”
Now you may be wondering (as I was)- What is the wooden woman? Located in the exhibit, alongside books and student feedback, is a four-ish-foot-tall large branch, “dressed” in a gingham dress and a hat to create the impression of a woman, with several protruding branches serving as limbs. The “wooden woman” was put up by an excited fan of Le Guin to greet her upon arrival at Beloit College. Le Guin became fond of her, writing a poem about her, and the wooden woman became cemented as part of the story. “It was this kind of mystery,” Ketabgian explained. “It gained this kind of meaning for her, and also for people here.”
And, at the heart of the exhibit, is the question- what is the message that “The Dispossessed,” fifty years on, still has to offer to modern-day society? “The fact that the novel is about two planets, and planets that don’t talk to each other, is, I think, extremely relevant to our…society…right now,” Ketabgian says. “What Le Guin was writing about, talking about then continues to be relevant today…[Le Guin] was emphatic that we must be able to imagine alternatives to our world.”
“Le Guin in Beloit” will be on exhibition on the second floor of Morse Library until December 10.
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