@SpiralChris: Great piece, although Le Guin was not opposed to a hero’s journey, per se, only to the forced link between such journeys and ‘killing the monster’. Her Earthsea novels are a brilliant example of fantasies that have few battles but are full of rich characters and dramatic tension.
@SpiralChris I had never encountered the Le Guin piece, so it’s interesting to read it backwards through the lens of Haraway: Le Guin’s reworking of the hero’s journey is an “ironic political myth,” “wary of holism, but needy for connection”—which is, indeed, the logic of, the “carrier bag”