Literature—my favorite field. Heroism—my favorite topic. What I love most about literature is that it provides a writer the opportunity to create an indomitable hero in intense conflict against powerful antagonists. Conflict is the essence of a great story. The stories analyzed here all have it.
Who are the greatest heroes of world literature? What are the criteria of judging them? This talk analyzes and answers these questions.
This talk was given in California at ARI’s summer conference in 2018. My good friend, Anu Seppala, introduced me by saying I was “the most fun speaker ever”. In all modesty, I agree. Thank you, Anu—and enjoy the talk everyone! There cannot be a more fascinating or important topic.
The Self Under Siege: What Ayn Rand’s Epic Novel “The Fountainhead” Shows Us About the Societies We Build
Ayn Rand built five main characters in The Fountainhead who function as psychological archetypes, but her real achievement was more precise than that. She mapped five distinct textures of subjective experience that emerge from a single upstream choice: where does the self live?
