LITERARY NOMADS
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Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Transcript
Le Guin’s short story is hardly the first to ask difficult questions of our politics and ethics, but it is one of the more provocative. What should we turn away from? And what does privilege look like, exactly? Maybe we’re only reading it in a way that makes us comfortable answering.
6.00 Trailer
Ursula K. Le Guin (“Omelas” suppl.)
6.06 Stephen King Meets Shel Silverstein: Formalism and Trope in Story
(Le Guin supplement)
6.09 Le Guin Pt 1: The Hideous Bargain
“Omelas” - Main
Chapters - Part 1
1. I Walk Away
2. Opening Theme
3. A Moral Gauntlet
4. Omelas: The Story
5. The Giant Omelas in the Room
6. Dilemmas False and True
7. Narrative as Moral Test
8. Her Party, Her Rules: Scapegoats and Archetypes
9. So What Do We Do?
10. Closing Credits
6.10 Le Guin Pt 2: Architectures of Happiness
“Omelas” - Main
Chapters - Part 2
- The Weight of Happiness
- Opening Theme
- The Fictions of Happiness
- The Psychology of Complicity
- The “Conditions” of Omelas
- …And Its Virtues
- So What Is Left for Us?
- Closing Credits
6.11 Le Guin Pt. 3: The Reader's Labyrinth
“Omelas” - Main
Chapters - Part 3
- Into a Land UnLike Our Own
- Opening Theme
- The Narrator’s Rhetorical Toolkit
- Choices and Subversions
- And So We Walk Away?
- How Do I Teach This Nightmare?
- - A Political Poem?
- Closing Credits
6.12 Le Guin Pt. 4: The Ones Who Stay - NK Jemisin
“Omelas” - Main
Chapters - Part 4
- When a Place Is Not a Place
- Opening Theme
- From Complicity to Resolve
- Counter-Narrative & Dialogics
- Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”
- Narratives of Power & Normalization
- The Ambiguity of Moral Action: Bataille
- A Call to Ethical Attentiveness
- Book Clubs & Classrooms
- Where We Haven’t Explored
- Closing Credits
How many questions does Le Guin’s famous parable ask of us? And are these the ones that are really at stake?
“This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.“
Read the Story at the Internet Archive:
- Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”: https://archive.org/download/the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-ursula-k-leguin/The%20Ones%20Who%20Walk%20Away%20from%20Omelas%20-%20Ursula%20K%20LeGuin.pdf
Credits
Original music for The Waywords Podcast is by Randon Myles
Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Cite this podcast with MLA format:
Chisnell, Steve. “Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’” Waywords Studio, 2025, https://waywordsstudio.com/project/ursula-leguin-omelas/.
