How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis

ISBN-13: 9781501313110 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 264 str.

Adam Weiner

Opis

Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, Adam Weiner spans decades and continents to reveal the surprising connections between the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a relatively unknown nineteenth-century Russian author. A congressional investigation placed the blame for the financial crisis on Alan Greenspan and his deregulatory policies-his attempts, in essence, to put Ayn Rand's Objectivism into practice. Though developed most famously in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism sprouted from the Rational Egoism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to be Done? (1863), an enormously influential Russian novel decried by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov for its destructive radical ethics. In tracing the origins of Greenspan's ruinous ideology, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World combines literary and intellectual history to uncover the danger of hawking "the virtues of selfishness," even in fiction.

Recenzje

Weiner's is an intellectual history told as a horror story. The history is a deliberately ironic one: how "rational egoism," the doctrine of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel/manifesto "What Is to Be Done?," which was the inspiration for Russian revolutionaries from Bakunin to Lenin, migrated to the United States in the guise of Ayn Rand's far-right objectivism. . Weiner rises to the challenge of paraphrasing Chernyshevsky and Rand and illustrating the clumsiness and incoherence of their books. New York Times Book Review

Spis treści

Acknowledgments Introduction: On the Dubious Virtue of SelfishnessChapter One: Radicalizing DostoevskyChapter Two: "The Most Atrocious Work of Russian Literature"Chapter Three: Dostoevsky RebornChapter Four: Rigor "Mortus" or Waiting for RakhmetovChapter Five: Fire in the Minds of MenChapter Six: Rakhmetov Lives! Chapter Seven: The Vengeance of the MuseChapter Eight: In the Graveyard of Bad IdeasNotesWorks CitedIndex

O autorze

Adam Weiner is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Wellesley College, USA. His first book was By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (2000).