The Great Societies: Lowry’s “The Giver”

 

19 Dec 2025

Episode 6.20 –

The Great Societies: Lowry’s The Giver

Another thorny utopia, Lowry’s Community practices a different kind of strategy to the Hideous Bargain: ethical evasion, a too tempting strategy for all of us. Political? Yes. But also a YA fantasy vision of what some of the latest writers and thinkers believe we’re doing already.

Texts from this episode:

• Lois Lowry, The Giver, 1993
• Rabih Alameddine, Comforting Myths, 2024
• Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, 2025

Complete Resources: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/le-guin-omelas/

CHAPTERS

00:00     Choosing Ugliness
05:45     Intro Theme
06:19     Evasion Modeling
11:40     Meaning and Politics in The Giver
20:58     Price Tags for Blissful Ignorance
25:00     At Stake: The Sanitation of Memory
33:30     Where To?
36:44     Closing Credits

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Transcript:  https://waywordsstudio.com/general/transcript/6-20-the-great-societies-the-giver/

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Literary Nomads is the primary program of Waywords Studio (https://waywordsstudio.com). The podcast posts new material each week, with thought-provoking examinations of literature around selected questions or themes and several smaller supplemental episodes in between the larger programs: history, writing, and contemporary applications of ideas.

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CREDITS:

Original music by Randon Myles (https://randonmyles.com/)

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

USING THIS WORK:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It is open to be used and adapted for all not-for-profit uses with proper attribution.

MLA CITATION:

Chisnell, Steve. “6.20 The Great Societies: Lowry’s The Giver,” Literary Nomads. Waywords Studio, 19 Dec 2025, https://waywordsstudio.com/project/le-guin-omelas/.