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E-book Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight : Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading

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Penilaian

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The twinship phenomenon might be a mere curiosity, a quirk of fate and fortune, were the two writers’ legacies less politically fraught and consequential. Both get blamed for a lot of dam-age in the world. Nabokov is sometimes charged, from the right flank, with condoning or committing or making light of pedo-philia (a recent scholarly book promises guidance on Teaching Nabokov’s “Lolita” in the #MeToo Era1). And this charge itself is but a local instance of a broader, left-flank grievance: he’s some-times mistaken, with cause, for one of those Dead White Patri-archs responsible for the subjugation of women, the silencing of pan-ethnic voices, and the prevalence of homophobia. (If this were true, if his work were to advocate, implicitly or explicitly, any of these platforms, it would be too boring to read; though if you happen to have thin skin or like preachy fiction, Nabokov will probably offend you.) Still, it took a mind like Rand’s to detect something more pervasively sinister in Nabokov’s aes-thetic. She shared her verdict with an interviewer: “He is a bril-liant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill can justify them.”2Given Rand’s overtly political aspirations (she, the self-styled ideologue and agitator), as opposed to Nabokov’s ivory-tower aestheticism, the problem of influence applies more to her than to him, and deservedly she takes the worst of the opprobrium. In a 2018 think-piece for Aeon magazine, Skye Cleary, a lecturer at Columbia University, claims that “Rand’s rhetoric continues to enthral millions of readers,” spreading an ethic of “victim-blam[ing]” (vis-à-vis her love-as-rape scenes), in addition to her brand of myopic self-interest and malignant capitalism.3 Bill McKibben, writing for The New Yorker in 2018, counts Rand’s influence among the “myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction” on climate change: “Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of [Atlas Shrugged] continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message.”4 And in Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019), Lisa Duggan, a pro-fessor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, reflects on the rise of Trump, the vitriol that shapes public pol-icy, and observes, “Ayn Rand is the writer whose dour visage presides over the spirit of our time.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

321.9 STO e

Penerbit

USA : Punctum books., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

191 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781685710996

Klasifikasi

321.9

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Authoritarian Government

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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