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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Narrated Rand: HUAC, Engraved Invitations and the Real of Sexual Difference

Author : Neil Cocks

Published in: Questioning Ayn Rand

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter 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 their 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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Title: Narrated Rand: HUAC, Engraved Invitations and the Real of Sexual Difference
Author: Neil Cocks
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Questioning Ayn Rand
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-53072-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-53073-0

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53073-0_4