202 research outputs found
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Narrated Rand: HUAC, engraved invitations, and the real of sexual difference
No full textThis chapter of my edited book on Rand draws on Rand’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), her description of the individualism of one of the heroes of her novel The Fountainhead, the infamous rape scene in that novel, and the celebrated analysis of this by Slavoj Žižek. The aim is to suggest that the purity of Rand’s narratives is always compromised, not least through its literary status: Rand is constantly disavowing the narrative frame that is necessary for her philosophy to be ‘revealed’. The chapter argues that a comparable disavowal can be read in the work of her most radical of critics
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‘“Oh, that's Francisco's private joke” […]’: Atlas shrugged, the gold standard, and utopia
No full textObjectivist economics rests upon the gold standard, this understood to signal a commitment to self-regulation and a rejection of all discretionary measures. For Objectivists, gold has an intrinsic value, and an economy based on the precious metal is thus taken to be rooted in reality and resistant to inflation. Rand makes an analogy between this understanding of gold and ‘competence’ within everyday life: accurately comprehending the world and having the skills to productively act within it are declared to be the ‘gold standard’ of morality. This chapter is concerned specifically with questioning this construction of the gold standard in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Through a detailed reading of the text, it draws out gold’s constitutive tensions within the novel: a substance and yet substitutive; necessarily present whilst always somewhere else; secondary as well as primary; reassuringly natural yet dangerously figurative. Through an appeal to Melinda Cooper’s recent work on the family within C20th American politics, the chapter concludes this book by contending that the gold standard morality and economics of Atlas Shrugged rest on unacknowledged contradictions, with the uncanny supporting the Randian political economy even as it disturbs the self-identity and surety upon which it calls
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Questioning Ayn Rand: subjectivity, political economy, and the arts
No full textThis book will offer the first, sustained academic critique of the work of Ayn Rand. Rand’s texts are often dismissed out of hand by those hostile to the ideology promoted within them. This book argues, instead, that considering the influence this work exerts on the present cultural and economic climate, there is a pressing need for it to be taken seriously and analysed in detail. . Rand’s worldview does not tolerate uncertainty, relying as it does upon a notion of truth untroubled by doubt. In contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that any progressive response to Rand should resist the dubious comforts of a position of ethical or aesthetic purity, even as it challenges the individualistic ideology of ‘selfishness’ promoted within her philosophy. This critique is achieved through chapters that engage the diversity of Rand’s interests and influences, from Psychoanalysis to The Gold Standard; from Hannah Arendt to Spiderman
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The peripheral child in nineteenth century literature and its criticism
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Transnational Gothic histories and the migrant experience in Britain
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Ghost story in a box booklet
No full textIn 2020, the Department of English Literature at UoR worked on a Study Higher outreach project designed to acquaint GCSE literature students with ideas and approaches to the subject that might be encountered at HE level. The project took the form of a card game that encouraged collaborative story telling. It focused on The Ghost Story, and introduced players to ideas of genre, as well as addressing historical and theory contexts.
The repository item is the booklet that accompanied the game, It was written by Neil Cocks from DEL, with additional material from Katy Green, SLL Outreach Lead, and James Stoorie, a creative writer specialising in tales of the supernatural. The booklet was designed and illustrated by Study Higher
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Student-centred: education, freedom, and the idea of audience. 2nd edition
No full textAn updated second edition of the classic, questioning account of the relationship between student-centred learning and managerialism, with a new introduction by the author, arguing for its continuing relevance
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Topographies of liberal thought: Rand and Arendt and race
No full textThis chapter compares arguments on de-segregation in American schools, especially the 1957 ‘Little Rock incident’, as forwarded by Ayn Rand and Hannah Arendt. Both came out against moves to promote integration in classrooms, and through contrasting what might seem their aligned positions, this chapter draws out the wider stakes involved a comparative reading of their work. Central to this project, and central also to recent ‘alt-right’ contributions to debates on ‘liberalism’, are questions of topography. What are the demarcations that must be called upon when separating a celebrated theorist such as Arendt from a seemingly peripheral and problematic thinker such as Rand? And how might the difficulties involved in corralling these two impact on the kind of physical and social separations that are evoked and evaded within their racist discourse, and any subsequent critical responses to this
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Literature, the Gothic and the reconstruction of history: the past as nightmare
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