Are you looking for a way to make your students fall in love with reading? To "set their souls on fire"? To learn to ask life's profoundest questions? Do you want to give them, in Ayn Rand's words, "the emotional experience of admiration for man's highest potential, the experience of looking up to a hero"?
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Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man's existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting.In The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand analyzed Romantic literature and explained its crucial importance. She agreed with Aristotle's observation that while history represents things as they are, fiction represents them "as they might be and ought to be." A supreme artist herself, she maintained that Romantic authors recreate a universe of life-and-death struggles, of heroes and villains:
| [. . .] The distinguishing characteristic of this top rank [of Romantic writers] (apart from their purely literary genius) is their full commitment to the premise of volition in both of its fundamental areas: in regard to consciousness and to existence, in regard to man's character and to his actions in the physical world. Maintaining a perfect integration of these two aspects, unmatched in the brilliant ingenuity of their plot structures, these writers are enormously concerned with man's soul (i.e., his consciousness). They are moralists in the most profound sense of the word; their concern is not merely with values, but specifically with moral values and with the power of moral values in shaping human character. Their characters are "larger than life," i.e., they are abstract projections in terms of essentials.. In their stories, one will never find action for action's sake, unrelated to moral values. The events of their plots are shaped, determined and motivated by the characters' values (or treason to values), by their struggle in pursuit of spiritual goals and by profound value-conflicts. Their themes are fundamental, universal, timeless issues of man's existence-and they are the only consistent creators of the rarest attribute of literature: the perfect integration of theme and plot, which they achieve with superlative virtuosity. |
As examples of great Romantic writers, Ayn Rand named: Friedrich Schiller (e.g., The Robbers, Wallenstein, Don Carlos, William Tell and The Conspiracy of Fiesco) Feodor Dostoevsky (eg., The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Gambler) Victor Hugo (e.g., Ninety-Three, The Man Who Laughs, Toilers of the Sea and Les Misérables). Ayn Rand also pointed out a number of other individual works of literature (by writers of uneven quality) which approach this level (see TRM).
| Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man's existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting. This desire is the root and motor of Romantic imagination. Its greatest example, in popular literature, is O. Henry, whose unique characteristic is the pyrotechnical virtuosity of an inexhaustible imagination projecting the gaiety of a benevolent, almost childlike sense of life. More than any other writer, O. Henry represents the spirit of youth-specifically, the cardinal element of youth: the expectation of finding something wonderfully unexpected around all of life's corners. |
Romantic literature presents students -- indeed, everyone -- with dramatic plots that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) address fundamental questions of life. Is life to be enjoyed? Can one rely on one's own judgment or not? What is the world like? Can the good succeed or does evil ultimately win? These are the sorts of questions, Ayn Rand believed, which everyone must answer.
To learn more about Ayn Rand's views on literary esthetics in general, and Romanticism in particular, read The Romantic Manifesto and The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Readers and Writers. You can read about Ayn Rand's own literary development in The Early Ayn Rand and also in Journals of Ayn Rand.
To receive a free Teacher's Guide on Ayn Rand's novels Anthem and The Fountainhead, please visit our essay contest pages or write to The Ayn Rand® Institute at essay@aynrand.org
But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
--Ayn Rand, Introduction to The Fountainhead