Warm-Up

1. Warm-Up • Please respond to the following quote. What is Ayn Rand saying? Prediction for Anthem? “I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.” -- Ayn Rand, preface of Anthem

3. Part A:Ayn Rand-Early Life • Born in Russia in 1905 • By the time she was 9 years old, she had decided to make fiction-writing her career.

4. Ayn Rand-Education • Grew up educated under Communists; experienced firsthand “the horrors of totalitarianism” • America = model of what a nation of free men could be • Became interested in movies/theatre and moved to America—represented her individualist philosophy

5. Ayn Rand-Adult Life • Hard time getting works published  controversial material; however, eventually published • Established herself as a “champion for individualism” • Philosophy = objectivism • Spent last years of her life lecturing on this philosophy • Died in 1982

6. “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” -- Ayn Rand

7. Ayn Rand-Writing/Professional • Sold 1st screenplay in 1932 • Did not sell 1st novel until 1936 (took 3 years to get published) • Works of Fiction: • The Fountainhead • Anthem, written in 1937 • Atlas Shrugged • Summary: Write in your own words

8. Part F:Sigmund Freud • 1856-1939 • Austrian psychiatrist • Psychoanalysis

9. Freud’s Personality Model • Id = pleasure principle, allows for basic needs to be met; own satisfaction; no sense of reality • Ego = “the balancer;” based on reality principle; meets needs of id but takes into consideration reality of the situation; in a healthy person, ego is the strongest • Superego = moral part of us and develops due to the moral and ethical restraints placed on us by our caregivers; our conscience—dictates our belief of right and wrong • If id gets too strong, impulses and self-gratification take over; if superego gets too strong, person is driven by rigid morals and is judgmental and unbending in interactions

11. Utopia: name for an ideal community or society; word was invented by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book, Utopia • Dystopia: an often futuristic society that has been forced into a repressive and controlled state, often under the disguise of being utopian • Anthem is a dystopia, meaning the world presented in the novel is the world as it should not be

12. Preview of Anthem • Original working title of Anthem: Ego • Ego began as a play about a collectivist society that lost the word, “I” • Theme of Anthem: “The meaning of man’s ego” • Questions to ask yourself during reading: • Who am I? • Is it possible to stand on my own? • If we could choose what kind of society to have, what should we choose? Is there a perfect society? • Do I have the right to pursue my own happiness? • Can a society without freedom be productive?

13. What We Can Anticipate “They existed only to serve the state. They were conceived in controlled Palaces of Mating. They died in the Home of the Useless. From cradle to grave, the crowd was one—the great WE. “In all that was left of humanity there was only one man who dared to think, seek, and love. He, Equality 7-2521, came close to losing his life because his knowledge was regarded as a treacherous blasphemy…he had rediscovered the lost and holy word—I.”