/lit/ - Literature

>Just follow your own rational self interest, bro
Isn't it in someone's rational self interest to have a functioning society instead of being a greedy capitalist pig who disregards everyone and everything save for their wealth and power?

miss me yet?

Why did she seethe so much at Kant and Plato?

She's actually a pretty good novelist. We the Living and The Fountainhead are excellent novels. Characters like Andrei, Keating and Wynand are very psychologically interesting. Atlas Shrugged is kind of a downgrade from those but still has its moments.

She's underrated as a novelist. We the Living and The Fountainhead are excellent novels, and even Atlas Shrugged is a very interesting, unique read. She's the only writer that's managed to bring the heroic out of the bourgeois (instead of making a bourgeois that happens to be heroic and whose heroic qualities are erasures of his bourgeois ones), and she's also a master of structure. The later two novels are gigantic but not one word is superfluous to the image she wants to picture.

>>22172340
I think it is the weakest of the three major Rand novels, but it's very interesting nonetheless. I find it unique in how Rand tries to see and bring out the heroic in the bourgeois (as opposed to just having a bourgeois that is heroic), and I think she was majorly successful in the task, considering the broad appeal Atlas managed to have. Just for that I think it's worth reading, from a literary point of view. She's also very good at structuring her novels, people talk about the size but it never felt like anything in the book was superfluous, not even the speeches. The main weakness I feel is that the book often comes across as quite hysterical at some points, giving more meaning to mundane elements than necessary, but that's more of a fault of Rand's philosophy than her literary exposition of it.

All in all, I don't regret reading it. Rand is underrated as a novelist.

>>21739570
No, she looks like this.
The book cover is probably meant to be Dominique Francon, a character from the book.

>Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness ...

>Literature re-creates reality by means of language ... The relation of literature to man’s cognitive faculty is obvious: literature re-creates reality by means of words, i.e., concepts. But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of man’s awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc.

>All these arts are conceptual in essence, all are products of and addressed to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness, and they differ only in their means. Literature starts with concepts and integrates them to percepts—painting, sculpture and architecture start with percepts and integrate them to concepts. The ultimate psycho-epistemological function is the same: a process that integrates man’s forms of cognition, unifies his consciousness and clarifies his grasp of reality.

>It is not journalistic information or scientific education or moral guidance that man seeks from a work of art (though these may be involved as secondary consequences), but the fulfillment of a more profound need: a confirmation of his view of existence—a confirmation, not in the sense of resolving cognitive doubts, but in the sense of permitting him to contemplate his abstractions outside his own mind, in the form of existential concretes.

>The importance of that experience is not in what he learns from it, but in that he experiences it. The fuel is not a theoretical principle, not a didactic “message,” but the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of metaphysical joy—a moment of love for existence.

>>20591102
Already was.
Granted, she immigrated.

>Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence.

She was right about everything.

I've never read philosophy before but now I really want to get into Ayn Rand. Is this okay or should I start reading philosophy through Greek philosophers; Socrates, Plato, Aristoteles, etc.?

We the Living and the Fountainhead are genuinely great novels and I'm tired of pretending they're not.

Is she as bad as they say?

Why does she make so many people seeze?

>>19855738
Pic related. No I'm not joking.

remember when she mocked retarded children?

>In September the tenants of the Home moved in. A small, expert staff was chosen by Toohey. It had been harder to find the children who qualified as inmates. Most of them had to be taken from other institutions. Sixty-five children, their ages ranging from three to fifteen, were picked out by zealous ladies who were full of kindness and so made a point of rejecting those who could be cured and selecting only the hopeless cases. There was a fifteen year old boy who had never learned to speak; a grinning child who could not be taught to read or write; a girl born without a nose, whose father was also her grandfather; a person called "Jackie" of whose age or sex nobody could be certain. They marched into their new home, their eyes staring vacantly, the stare of death before which no world existed...

>The most important time of her day was the hour assigned to the children's art activities, known as the "Creative Period." There was a special room for the purpose - a room with a view of the distant city skyline - where the children were given materials and encouraged to create freely, under the guidance of Catherine who stood watch over them like an angel presiding at a birth.

>She was elated on the day when Jackie, the least promising one of the lot, achieved a completed work of imagination. Jackie picked up fistfuls of colored felt scraps and a pot of glue, and carried them to a corner of the room. There was, in the corner, a slanting ledge projecting from the wall - plastered over and painted green - left from Roark's modeling of the Temple interior that had once controlled the recession of the light at sunset. Catherine walked over to Jackie and saw, spread out on the ledge, the recognizable shape of a dog, brown, with blue spots and five legs. Jackie wore an expression of pride. "Now you see, you see?" Catherine said to her colleages. "Isn't it wonderful and moving! There's no telling how far the child will go with the proper encouragement. Think of what happens to their little souls if they are frustrated in their creative instincts! It's so important not to deny them a change for self-expression. Did you see Jackie's face?"

What the fuck is her problem?

Is her philosophy worth getting into or is it just the same "The freer market, the freer the people" bootlicking imbecility that all libertarians preach?

I've heard about her books many times but I find that whenever they're mentioned on reddit they get absolutely shit on. Are any of them worth a read?

>>18663047
OP here, wrong pic.

ITT: Great women in/of literature