By Jeffrey Allen Tucker

This essay is part of The MLA Democracy Project: Essays on Teaching Democracy and Literature.

Experiencing Civic Life (ECL) is a two-week residential summer program that brings selected high school students from the city of Rochester, New York, to the campus of the University of Rochester. Administered by the Department of History, ECL’s overview statement states that its goals are “1) to equip students to succeed as college students and engaged citizens by sharpening critical thinking, reading, and writing skills; 2) to build students’ confidence in their ability to undertake liberal arts college work and assist them in the college planning process; and 3) to affirm students’ potential to effect change in the Rochester community” (Rubin). The program includes meetings with civic leaders, field trips to cultural institutions, an introduction to college life, and hands-on community projects; there is also an academic component linking civic education and the humanities. Each morning, a faculty member leads a seminar on a selected reading, such as Sophocles’s Antigone, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook,” or excerpts from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In 2022, I was asked to lead discussion on Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and for suggestions for additional readings; N. K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” immediately came to my mind. The seminars on these short stories have since served as bookends for the program.

The ECL program opens with Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which presents its jubilant titular city as a utopian alternative to the world of the reader; the narrator later reveals, however, that to maintain this utopia a child must remain locked away in a dark and filthy basement. Although most citizens accept that they must not rescue or comfort the child, or else their city’s wonders will cease to exist, there are other citizens, the conclusion explains, who walk away, leaving Omelas. When I lead the seminars I introduce contexts for the assigned readings, ask questions related to those contexts, and use student responses to initiate general discussion. I start by pointing out the ambiguous meaning of the word utopia, both “the good place” and “no place,” and introducing the interdisciplinary field of utopian studies. Especially pertinent is the distinction between dystopia, for example as represented in works like 1984 and The Hunger Games, and anti-utopia, the critique of the pursuit of the ideal. After a brief biography of Le Guin, I ask students to identify the story’s distinctive features; students usually mention its vivid detailing of Omelas’s wonders and its metafictional devices, such as the narrator’s direct address to the reader. Before we take a break, I ask the students to consider how this work of science fiction addresses the present, either that of a reader in the 1970s or our own; when we reconvene, they usually compare the acceptance of the child’s suffering to inaction toward contemporary problems both local (such as homelessness, child poverty, inequities between urban and suburban schools) and global (such as unjust labor practices abroad, climate change, humanitarian crises). I add that “Omelas” was published at a time of antiwar, youth, and other social movements, which contextualizes the portrayal of Omelas in the first part of the story. My next question is about whether the story’s theme is utopian or anti-utopian. For most students, the imprisonment of the child and the fact that some people leave Omelas, presumably in protest, point to an interpretation of the story as a critique that utopias are either impossible, require violence, or are hostile to dissent; others insist that the story’s representation of a world better than our own is more than a mere setup for the twist that follows. I usually note, if the students do not, that much depends on how we judge those who “walk away”: Are they abandoning responsibility or pursuing a way of life better than what they have known?

ECL concludes with Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” which pays homage to Le Guin’s story through its title, structure, narration, and explicit allusions. Jemisin’s story describes the utopian city of Um-Helat (which sounds a bit like “Omelas”), a place whose distant past is revealed to be the reader’s present. In Um-Helat, citizens ensure each other’s well-being; the story also condemns inequities that are implied to be normal or accepted in the reader’s own time and interrogates the mindsets that allow such injustices to persist. Like Le Guin’s story, Jemisin’s takes a surprising turn: social workers have killed a man in front of his young daughter for trafficking in potentially dangerous information from our own far-from-ideal world (a topic for discussion all by itself). The story concludes with a direct request to the reader to join the narrator, as the daughter will join the social workers, to fight for the better society that Um-Helat represents. I again provide some context, this time with examples of Afrofuturism in music, film, and other types of visual culture, as well as writing. Then I describe some basic critical approaches to literature: formal, author-centered, intertextual, and historical; I refer to our discussion of “Omelas” for examples and ask students to identify aspects of Jemisin’s story that each approach makes legible. There is usually much to say about the formal similarities between Jemisin’s and Le Guin’s stories and about how Jemisin’s speaks to our current historical moment through references to social media, anti-racism initiatives, evolving understandings of gender, and more. I also cite Jemisin’s own comments about writing science fiction and fantasy as a Black woman. Before we break, I ask the students to hypothetically choose either Le Guin’s story or Jemisin’s for inclusion in ECL’s curriculum based on relevance to the program’s goals, other readings, and the students’ own experiences. Such a choice is difficult, of course, but the students appreciate the opportunity to evaluate the program’s readings. In turn, I appreciate the opportunity that ECL provides these students to ask questions about the structures of the world, speculate about the kind of society they want for themselves, identify the actions they can take toward realizing those ideals, and recognize the role that literature can play in these activities.

Works Cited

Jemisin, N. K. “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” How Long ’til Black Future Month, by Jemisin, Orbit, 2018, pp. 1–13.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg, Doubleday, 1973, pp. 1–8.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. “Overview of Experiencing Civic Life.” 2025.

Jeffrey Allen Tucker is associate professor of English at the University of Rochester.