I am happy to share with you my first finished Patreon project.
Patreon projects help me keep on academic work in the circumstances I do not want to waste time on describing now, I have done so here, in the general introduction of my Patreon endeavor. Patreon projects are academic investigations that create a bridge between what I do in English and what I do in Hungarian, and I am really grateful for the patrons for allowing me to carry on thinking.
MY FIRST FINISHED PATREON PROJECT has two parts: a) an essay on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle in Hungarian and b) an audio / podcast on the same topic in English.
Ursula K. Le Guin is acknowledged as one of the writers who undermined inherited fantasy tropes, wrote different quests and different conflicts, did not use characters who were evil just because they loved being evil, and, importantly, created tons of interesting female characters and made the gender of the characters a decisive factor. There is a sense of deep wisdom in all of her works.
I show that we can understand the Earthsea cycle in a new way if we see that vulnerability is gradually becoming a central topic of the six books of the cycle. I talk about the ethics of vulnerability (which is a key idea in my upcoming book, Comics and the Body), and then I show how this works in the second book of the cycle, The Tombs of Atuan. I tried to give many examples and no spoilers. I think it is understandable even if you haven’t read the book yet. I hope so!
Eszter Szép 