Sunday, August 24, 2008

Anvilicious!

TV Tropes, the site dedicated to popular culture cliches, takes a hilarious look at the various cliches populating "Atlas Shrugged". Particularly good are "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero", the "Author Filibuster", and the spot-on neologism for Rand's writing style, "Anvilicious."

Anvilicious: A portmanteau of anvil and either delicious or malicious, depending on the usage, anvilicious describes a writer's and/or director's use of an artistic element, be it line of dialogue, visual motif, or plot point, to so obviously or unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head. Frequently, the element becomes anvilicious through unnecessary repetition, but true masters can achieve anviliciousness with a single stroke
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(Hat tip to The Atheist Experience)

2 comments:

Neon Vincent said...

TV Tropes' main page is a great starting point, as the book itself is pretty "troperiffic," but you and your readers should visit the other pages on the site about the book. One of my favorites is the "Just Bugs Me" page. It's the place for contributor to take issue with the plot holes and logical fallacies within the book.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustBugsMe/AtlasShrugged

One of my personal favorites is a comparison between Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard:

"It is an interesting exercise to compare Ayn Rand's forward to Atlas Shrugged (she claims that she is the only novelist in history to write about a new idea) with L. Ron Hubbard's forward to his Mission Earth series (he claims that if you don't find it uproariously funny you're obviously exactly the sort of shumck he was trying to ridicule, and no, he's not kidding). I am quite sure the two were never in the same room together, as the Universe would have collapsed from the accumulated hubris. On that note--

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Fountainhead_Earth"

Other pages worth reading are Ayn Rand's own author page:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AynRand

And the Useful Notes on Objectivism page.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Objectivism

That last page is one I recommend you pay close attention to.

Daniel Barnes said...

Cheers NV will do.