Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: Understanding and Teaching a Modern ClassicBy Shoshana Milgram In her course, instructor Shoshana Milgram, Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech, will present some of what she has learned from many years of teaching The Fountainhead in courses on American Literature, Freshman Writing, and other areas. She will consider the essence of Ayn Rand’s literary technique in this novel, as well as specific issues such as the inclusion of The Fountainhead within a course syllabus, reading and writing assignments, the use of class time, and methods for encouraging and addressing difficult questions. Shoshana Milgram [Knapp] holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. She has published articles on a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures in French, Russian, and English/American literature, including Napoleon Bonaparte, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoi, Victoria Cross, George Eliot, John Fowles, W. S. Gilbert, Henry James, Ursula K. LeGuin, Vladimir Nabokov, Herbert Spencer, W. T. Stead, E. L. Voynich and Ayn Rand. She is also the author of introductions to editions of Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs, by Victor Hugo, The Seafarers, by Nevil Shute, and Graustark, by George Barr McCutcheon. Her current project is a study of Ayn Rand’s life up to 1957. Playback of this video requires RealPlayer®. Lecture (71 minutes) |