Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts offers a sustained academic critique of Ayn Rand's works and her wider Objectivist philosophy. While Rand's texts are often dismissed out of hand by those hostile to the ideology promoted within them, these essays argue instead that they need to be taken seriously and analysed in detail. Rand's influential 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 they challenge the reductive individualistic ideology promoted within her writing. Drawing on a range of sources and approaches from Psychoanalysis to The Gold Standard and from Hannah Arendt to Spiderman, these essays consider Rand's works in the context of wider political, economic, and philosophical debates.
Chapter 1: Introduction: uncanny Rand,
Neil Cocks.- Chapter 2: Reading Ayn Rand psychoanalytically: ethics, libertarian and otherwise,
Ian Parker.- Chapter 3: Psychologization, what it is and what it is not: Objectivism, psychology, and Silicon Valley,
Jan de Vos.- Chapter 4: Narrated Rand: HUAC, engraved invitations, and the real of sexual difference,
Neil Cocks.- Chapter 5: The American mythology of individualism: Emerson, Ayn Rand, and the Romantic child,
Kristina West.- Chapter 6: Selfish cinema: sex, heroism, and control in adaptations of Ayn Rand for the screen,
Lisa Downing.- Chapter 7: At home with Marx and Rand: returning man in prehistory,
Bonnie McGill.- Chapter 8: The New Left: Rand, pedagogy, and 'the cure',
Jerome Cox- Strong.- Chapter 9: Topographies of Liberal Thought: Rand and Arendt and Race,
Stephen Thomson.- Chapter 10: '"Oh, that's Francisco's private joke" [...]': Atlas Shrugged, the gold standard, and utopia,
Neil Cocks.
Neil Cocks is Associate Professor of Literary Perspective in the Department of English Literature, University of Reading, UK. He is the author of
Higher Education Discourse and Deconstruction: Challenging the Case for Transparency and Objecthood (Palgrave 2017) and
The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism (Palgrave 2014).
