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An Introduction to the Study of Ayn Rand
A Companion to Ayn Rand, 2016
Ayn Rand is among the most outspoken, and important, intellectual voices in America, wrote Playboy Magazine in 1964. She is the author of what is perhaps the most fiercely damned and admired best seller of the decade, Atlas Shrugged. This chapter discusses some of the reasons for studying Rand and some of the challenges involved. It also discusses a few features of Rand's corpus and her life that should be borne in mind when studying her.
Recent Work On Truth: Ayn Rand
Philosophical Books, 2003
Since the 1982 death of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, there has been ever-growing interest in her thought. In the immediate aftermath of her death, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen's edited collection, The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand , and the first edition of Mimi Reisel Gladstein's Ayn Rand Companion were published. This was followed in the late 1980s by the appearance of a memoir from Rand's closest associate, psychologist Nathaniel Branden, and a best-selling biography by Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand. That biography was later adapted as a Showtime movie, starring the Emmy-award winning Helen Mirren as the Russian-born Rand. Rand's life was also the subject of a 1997 Academy Award-nominated documentary, 'Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life', directed by Michael Paxton and narrated by actress Sharon Gless. Rand-mania reached a cultural apex of sorts with the release, in 1999, of a United States commemorative postage stamp in her honour. With her influence extending even to a Federal Reserve Chair, Alan Greenspan, who was a high profile member of her inner circle in the 1950s and 1960s, Rand citations have multiplied exponentially. Popular references to Rand can be found in the music of the rock band Rush (and in scholarship on progressive rock, see my 'Rand, Rush, and Rock'), in the comics of Frank Miller and 'Spider-Man' co-creator Steve Ditko, in television series, such as 'The Gilmore Girls', 'Queer as Folk', and 'Judging Amy', and even in cartoons-from 'South Park' to 'The Simpsons'. Indeed, philosopher William Irwin and writer J.R. Lombardo, in an examination of textual allusion, tell us of Rand's appearance in The Simpsons and Philosophy : ".. . in 'A Streetcar Named Maggie', Maggie is placed in the 'Ayn Rand School for Tots' where the proprietor, Mr. Sinclair, reads The Fountainhead Diet. To understand why pacifiers are taken away from Maggie and the other children one has to catch the allusion to the radical libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand. Recognizing and understanding this allusion yields much more pleasure than would a straightforward explanation that Maggie has been placed in a daycare facility in which tots are trained to fend for themselves, not to depend on others, not even to depend on their pacifiers" (p. 85). Together with this heightened cultural awareness of Rand's life and thought, academic work has proceeded apace with some fanfare. Both The 1. There are also quite a few accessible works written by non-professional philosophers. See Ronald Merrill's Ideas of Ayn Rand , which focuses on the broad essentials of Rand's system of thought; Craig Biddle's Loving Life , which focuses on Rand's ethics; Alexandra York's From The Fountainhead to the Future and Other Essays on Art and Excellence , which deals with Objectivist aesthetics and romanticism; Tom Porter's Ayn Rand's Theory of Knowledge , which offers a commentary on Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology ; and Peter Erickson's The Stance of Atlas , which features critical discussion in dialogue form. Recently published commentaries by writers of a more religious bent include John Robbins's Without a Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System and Michael B. Yang's Reconsidering Ayn Rand. For a discussion of Rand's Objectivist movement, starkly alternative readings are offered by Jeff Walker (The Ayn Rand Cult) and philosopher David Kelley (The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand). 2. One notable published title is Gregory M. Browne's Necessary Factual Truth , which is an expansion of his philosophy dissertation. Browne discusses central themes in Leonard Peikoff 's 'Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy', which can be found in the expanded edition of Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology .
Glimpses of the Mystical Dimension of Ayn Rand's Thought
JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES, 2022
ABSTRACT: This article presents ideas long considered to be almost exclusively Rand’s, in connection to their expression in the literature of mysticism. The author argues that these ideas, far from being unique to Rand, are hall marks of mysticism.
Pitiless Adolescents and Young Crusaders: Reimagining Ayn Rand's Readers
In the United States, Ayn Rand's (1905–1982) novels still appeal to a large readership, in spite of their age and length. While many attribute Rand's lasting popularity to her effect on the presumably young and impressionable, few have actually explored why her novels at times prove to be such a transformative reading experience. The article retraces Rand's impact, through the lens of four writers who have reimagined her readers: Gene H. Bell-Villada, in the novella The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand; Tobias Wolff, in Old School; William F. Buckley, in Getting It Right; and Mary Gaitskill, in Two Girls, Fat and Thin. While Bell-Villada, Wolff, and Buckley convey their own attitudes toward Rand through their characters and shy away from creating strong Randian adherents, Gaitskill's dark satiric novel offers a surprisingly more empathic account of a pseudo-Randian acolyte.
2015
Change is inevitable in our society. There are few people who changed the society with their iconoclastic and catalytic views even after their death. Ayn Rand is one among them who has changed the lives of youngsters from no-confidence to new-confidence. This paper attempts to explain her strong views about selfishness, Marxism, objectivism etc., through various post-modernistic theories. This paper deals with her major novels Fountainhead and We the Living.
“Prospector and Jeweler”: Ayn Rand on the Relationship between Politics and Literature
Journal of American Studies, 2014
The novels by Russian immigrant writer Ayn Rand (1905-82) still attract a large readership, not least thanks to a recent renaissance of libertarian ideas in the US. Was it Rand’s intention, when writing her novels, to construct political tracts, as many insinuate, or was she indeed trying to imitate her literary idols, as she herself claimed? The answer is complicated due to Rand’s own contradictory statements on fiction’s impact. Although Rand suggested that it was the reader who gave text meaning, she also believed her books to have an unambiguous message that should have a distinct effect on the reader
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: A Critical Analysis
2021
This paper seeks to examine Ayn Rand’s ‘Fountainhead’ through a multi-focal dimension. It delineates the cartography of the themes of Rand’s Russian-American ethnicity and the socio-economic conditions of the post-World War II, linking it to the post-Depression world, which engendered the philosophy of Objectivism. Furthermore, the paper explores the societal beliefs and themes of Objectivism, Conformism, and Individualism by analyzing them in two different paradigms: when the novel was published and the status quo. The paper finally goes on to underline how these antagonistic views of society have been exemplified by Rand through the characters in the novel and how ‘The Fountainhead’ serves as a commentary on the schism in society over the topic of ‘individuality and conformism’.
Ayn Rand's Philosophic Achievement
2016
Ayn Rand's achievement in philosophy is so imlnense that to do it justice in an article would take an Ayn Rand. From "existence exists" to a new definition of Romanticism in art; from the theory of universals to the nature of self-esteem; from the role of the mind in production to the esthetics of music; from the meta physical status of sensory qualities to the need for objective law-like a philosophical Midas, any area she touched turned to knowledge. And all this from a novelist, a novelist who found that to define her concept of an ideal man she had to answer basic philosophical questions, and that each answer she reached confirmed, strengthened, and added to her previous answers, until she had formulated an invincible philosophic system. That system, Objectivism, has many distinctions: its originality, its independence of philosophic tradition, its integration-but these aspects become irrelevant in light of what is most distinctive about Ayn Rand's philosophy:...