Teaching Ayn Rand’s Anthem: Theme, Foils, and Special Challenges

By Shoshana Milgram

This 75-minute presentation will deal, first, with the theme of Anthem: how Ayn Rand develops this theme through style and story—and how we can help students understand the theme and examine the author’s techniques of development. A related topic is the classroom use of other works of fiction, such as George Orwell’s 1984, H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes, and Zamyatin’s We, in order to discern more precisely the method and message of Anthem. Finally, we will consider particular challenges in the teaching of Anthem, e.g. orienting students to a novella that begins in medias res, confronting common misconceptions about the novella, and scrutinizing Ayn Rand’s hand-written revisions of the original edition. The session will include opportunities for Q and A.

Shoshana Milgram [Knapp] holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. She is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. 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.