Man, his ideals and place in this world is a constant question for all people.How should man act in accordance with others? How should he perceivereality and himself? This essay attempts to answer these questions by lookingat Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars) by the author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) with an Objectivist perspective (the philosophy of AynRand). The essay analyzes the book by applying the four main principles ofObjectivism: reason, reality, rational self-interest and capitalism. It begins bylooking at how both Saint-Exupéry and Rand perceive the machine and laboras rational ways of self-sustainment and discovery. The machine serves as aphysical representation of rationality which furthers productivity and alsoeases labor. Later, the essay analyzes how charity, rational egoism and theirrepresentations in the book correspond with Objectivist philosophy.Afterwards it analyzes how reality and truth are represented with language asits proxy of representation and discovers that both authors perceive reality asan absolute and truth as its recognition. Lastly, the essay analyzes therelationship between war and ideology and Rand's and Saint-Exupéry'sthoughts on the subject. It finds some similarities between the two: they bothfind war distasteful and ultimately destructive. However, a difference wasdiscovered concerning the use of ideology. Saint-Exupéry finds little to nouse of it, whereas Rand sees it at man's main defense against philosophicalfallacies. Therefore, the final conclusion is that Terre des Hommes is notentirely an Objectivist book, but there are objectivist principles presented init.

In this article, I investigate the video game BioShock for its political and cultural work and argue that it offers a popular platform to discuss the politically charged question of choice, both inside and outside the realm of video games. In a first section, I introduce the game’s basic plot and setting, propose a way to study how video games operate narratively, and briefly discuss the ‘political’ dimension of games in general. Afterwards, I look at how BioShock is influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of individual choice and self-interest, and I trace this influence specifically in the game’s main antagonist, Andrew Ryan, and its setting, the underwater city of Rapture. With these elements as a basis, I analyze how BioShock engages with the politics of choice, focusing on a major twist scene in the game to demonstrate how BioShock deals with the question of choice on a metatextual level. Reading this scene in the context of the game’s overall narrative, specifically of moral choices in the game that lead to different endings, I argue that the game metatextually connects the political question of choice inherent in objectivism to the narrative and the playing of the game, pointing to the ambivalences inherent in questions of choice, agency, and free will.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This project responds to previous available literature on the subject of heroism, which tends to deal with either an isolated work or with genre- and archetype-specific analysis, and applies their concepts to case studies of Frank Miller’s various heroic models. In particular, this project addresses the film Sin City and the graphic novel The Dark Knight Strikes Again, arguing that DK2 serves as a departure of sorts from Miller’s ideals of heroism in his middle years (such as those presented in Sin City), as the protagonist becomes more of a revolutionary engaged in revamping society than the vigilante or “lone wolf” on the fringes of society. With the aforementioned sources as a general background, it is evident that Miller’s heroic ideals shift in their active capacity and scope but remain more or less steady in their strong individual sense of ethical duty. In addition, these sources aid in establishing the comparisons Miller actually invites to traditional, “archetypal” understandings of the hero as well as to the particular heroic form of Ayn Rand, which he explicitly references in DK2. Miller’s response to these previous models bolsters the assertion that theories of heroic ideals are inherently political as they deal with representations of the kind of person a hero must be, in turn involving issues of gender, ethnicity and class.