The Best American Novel of the 20th Century?

quadraphonics said:
Speaking of which: Anne Rice vs. Ayn Rand. The one is an American who writes about vampires, the other a vampire who writes about Americans...
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That's excellent!

That would still be an improvement on the Rand I've read which, as mentioned above, is in the throw-away paperback category, far below what even the basest Hollywood producer would invest mainstream movie money in.

Apparently both Arch Enemy and Rush have done Anthem-themed albums...

However it turns out there is actually already a Fountainhead film, and Atlas Shrugged is currently in the works. So I stand corrected...
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I was turned on to Ayn Rand at the age of 13 by Rush's 2112. My "Ayn Rand phase" was fortunately short-lived, perhaps 9 to 12 months. After plowing through her fiction, I turned to her non-fiction (The Virtue of Selfishness, Philosophy: Who Needs It?); how it dawned upon me at the age of 14 that her, um, "philosophy" (again, I don't think it's fair to real philosophers to...) was sheer nonsense is beyond me, and it was only some years later that I discovered her readings of Kant and Nietzsche to be adolescent at best.

Interestingly, a few mainstream publications have cited Atlas Shrugged as the most influential American novel of the previous century. L. Ron Hubbard should be turning in his grave.


Edit: Just found this in the wikipedia entry on Rand:
When a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club asked what the most influential book in the respondent's life was, Rand's Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible.[102] Readers polled in 1998 and 1999 by Modern Library placed four of her books on the 100 Best Novels list (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, and We the Living were in first, second, seventh, and eighth place, respectively) and one on the 100 Best Nonfiction list (The Virtue of Selfishness, in first place), with books about Rand and her philosophy in third and sixth place.[103] However, the validity of such polls has been disputed.[104] Freestar Media/Zogby polls conducted in 2007 found that around 8 percent of American adults have read Atlas Shrugged.[105]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_rand

Frightening...
 
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parmalee said:
I was turned on to Ayn Rand at the age of 13 by Rush's 2112. My "Ayn Rand phase" was fortunately short-lived, perhaps 9 to 12 months. After plowing through her fiction, I turned to her non-fiction (The Virtue of Selfishness, Philosophy: Who Needs It?); how it dawned upon me at the age of 14 that her, um, "philosophy" (again, I don't think it's fair to real philosophers to...) was sheer nonsense is beyond me
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Yeah, I have a similar story. Everyone should probably have a Rand phase some time in their adolescence, when they are self-centered know-it-alls.

The troubling thing is when people don't outgrow this phase, since finding the cracks in the foundation is the most rewarding part of the whole process.

parmalee said:
, and it was only some years later that I discovered her readings of Kant and Nietzsche to be adolescent at best.
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It is perhaps the greatest contribution that Nietzche ever made that his body of work functions as a near-perfect razor for separating the serious from the polemic. I.e., it's so full of pit-falls, devil's advocacy and irony that simpler minds quickly become lost in it, and their responses reveal them as such. You can learn a lot about a person from their reading of Nietzsche :]

The funniest wikipedia bit IMHO is here :

The Philosophical Lexicon, a satirical work maintained by philosophers Daniel Dennett and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, defines a "rand" as: 'An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption. "When I questioned his second premise, he flew into a rand."' Also, to attack or stigmatise through a rand. "When I defended socialised medicine, I was randed as a communist."
 
iceaura said:
btw: interesting that Vonnegut's great contribution in total does not suggest a "best novel" vote (from me either)
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I thought seriously about adding a vote for a Vonnegut novel, but without Kerouac's ground breaking "On the Road," where is there a place for the works of Vonnegut?
 
iceaura said:
It's important and all that, but it's juvenilia - the term "best" implies literary and philosophical merit at an adult level.
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You see, this is where you clearly need an education in philosophy. The only major school of philosophy to have ever been born IN American, and not in Europe or in Asia, IS Objectivism. She is responsible for that from her novels "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged." So, literary style and prose considerations aside, from just sheer impact on American thinking, character and philosophy? It's clear who is being "juvenile."

Am I saying it is a clear, well thought out, and good philosophy I agree with? No. But there are tenured professors that teach it at schools in the U.S. I don't call that Juvenile. I call it influential. Who would be a person that is an objectivist that was greatly influenced by this body of work and follows it's tenets? hmmm. . .

Try. . . Alan Greenspan? Ever hear of him? So perhaps, maybe, this IS an important work? The Age of Turbulence
 
The Esotericist said:
The only major school of philosophy to have ever been born IN American, and not in Europe or in Asia, IS Objectivism.
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First of all, Objectivism is not a "major school of philosophy." It's a fringe subject outside the mainstream of academic philosophy.

Second of all, in what sense was it "born IN American?" Sure, Ayn Rand lived here while writing novels, but she was born and educated in Russia, and the entire edifice of Objectivism is little more than a radical criticism of the Soviet Union.

Third of all, why on Earth should we care about how "American" a philosophy is? If anything, we should be suspicious of philosophies that lack wide appeal and contributions, as those are traits associated with the very best philosophies yet produced. Patriotism is not a useful razor for distinguishing worthwhile philosophies.

The Esotericist said:
But there are tenured professors that teach it at schools in the U.S.
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There are tenured professors that teach any number of inanities at schools in the U.S. Hell, there are entire schools dedicated to instruction in nonsense. The U.S. is a very big country, after all...

You'd probably be better of looking at what the non-tenured profs are teaching, if you want to know what's serious and mainstream. After all, their careers are on the line.
 
quadraphonics said:
Yeah, I have a similar story. Everyone should probably have a Rand phase some time in their adolescence, when they are self-centered know-it-alls.

The troubling thing is when people don't outgrow this phase, since finding the cracks in the foundation is the most rewarding part of the whole process.
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And the fact that there is scant secondary critical writing on Rand makes this even more rewarding, as one must do all the work on one's own. In this respect, I feel that I actually learned a great deal about philosophy by reading Rand, ironically.

It is perhaps the greatest contribution that Nietzche ever made that his body of work functions as a near-perfect razor for separating the serious from the polemic. I.e., it's so full of pit-falls, devil's advocacy and irony that simpler minds quickly become lost in it, and their responses reveal them as such. You can learn a lot about a person from their reading of Nietzsche :]

The funniest wikipedia bit IMHO is here :

The Philosophical Lexicon, a satirical work maintained by philosophers Daniel Dennett and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, defines a "rand" as: 'An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption. "When I questioned his second premise, he flew into a rand."' Also, to attack or stigmatise through a rand. "When I defended socialised medicine, I was randed as a communist."
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That aspect of Nietzsche has proved enormously influential on subsequent literature and philosophy; yet Rand read Nietzsche in the fashion that a fundamentalist reads the Bible.
 
The Esotericist said:
You see, this is where you clearly need an education in philosophy. The only major school of philosophy to have ever been born IN American, and not in Europe or in Asia, IS Objectivism. She is responsible for that from her novels "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged." So, literary style and prose considerations aside, from just sheer impact on American thinking, character and philosophy? It's clear who is being "juvenile."

Am I saying it is a clear, well thought out, and good philosophy I agree with? No. But there are tenured professors that teach it at schools in the U.S. I don't call that Juvenile. I call it influential. Who would be a person that is an objectivist that was greatly influenced by this body of work and follows it's tenets? hmmm. . .

Try. . . Alan Greenspan? Ever hear of him? So perhaps, maybe, this IS an important work? The Age of Turbulence
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Yes, but there are only a small handful of professors who teach Rand's work. The fact remains that most philosophy departments and professors hold little regard for her work out it's sheer lack of philosophical rigor. That said, I do consider Rand's work important in that it has proved enormously influential; but her "philosophy" is dogmatic and didactic, and does not reflect a spirit of enquiry.

While there isn't a uniquely American school of philosophy per se, there is a contemporary strain in philosophy which engages both the Anglo-Analytical tradition and the Continental tradition, while infusing aspects of uniquely American thought, from Transcendentalism to John Dewey. Stanley Cavell is perhaps the most prominent of this tradition.
 
esotericist said:
Try. . . Alan Greenspan? Ever hear of him? So perhaps, maybe, this IS an important work?
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I said it was important. Right there in the sentence you quoted.

The fact that Alan Greenspan, as a professional adult was a sincere devotee of Ayn Rand, is one of the very frightening and damaging circumstances of the last couple of decades. Very important.

Important it certainly is.

But we were talking about "best novel of the 20th century", not the important factors or symptoms of the infantilism that has recently proven so destructive in American politics.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
The first in the series was published in 1997. That was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the U.S. market. The Scholastic Corporation, which bought the American rights for $105K, an astronomical figure for a children's book, assumed that American children would not read a book with "Philosopher" in the title.
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Probably right. How about "Harry Potter and the Scholastic Corporation"? That would be a page-turner with the 6:30 train crowd, Myuu curse them.
 
Filthy accountant! How dare you say that? In East Korea, we would have you shot for such a statement. And for lots of other things.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
The author's pen name is also the result of market research. Bloomsbury, the original British publisher, assumed that boys were the book's target audience and that boys would not be interested in a book by a female author. So Joanne Rowling, who has no middle name, became J. K. Rowling.
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Isn't her middle name 'Kathleen'?

As for Rowling being Scottish, that's no more than a technicality. She speaks with a cut-glass English accent, as do her family, and she has lived in England for most of her life.

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The Catcher in the Rye would be my choice.
 
quadraphonics said:
It is perhaps the greatest contribution that Nietzsche ever made that his body of work functions as a near-perfect razor for separating the serious from the polemic. I.e., it's so full of pit-falls, devil's advocacy and irony that simpler minds quickly become lost in it, and their responses reveal them as such. You can learn a lot about a person from their reading of Nietzsche.
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Still is the bottom of my sea...who would guess that it harbors sportive monsters?
 
The Esotericist said:
That author would be Ayn Rand, and her Magnum Opus, which is most popular would be the 1,100-page Atlas Shrugged, that was published in 1957. If you really want to understand the U.S.A. and Americans, you MUST read it, no if's, and's, or but's. It is American culture to it's
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You think Ayn Rand is 'American Culture to it's core'. Please, she comes across as a petty self centred hate monger. Rand had some warped ideas for sure.
 
tuberculatious said:
we are not in east korea here buddy, we are in the oppressed west.
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Running dog imperialists! I spit on the ground you walk on!

...oh, and can we have some money? Because our electricity grid is not so good these days.
 
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