As always, it's a pleasure to read your posts. Such a keen mind, and such an insightful nutshell. But...
Thank you for the compliment.
As a writer, I can't endorse Rand's prose, even absent her message. Sure, she has moments of inspired adequacy, but if you write 500,00 words, chances are you'll strike lucky for a few thousand. And I can't give her a pass for being a non-native English writer: Nabakov wrote Lolita in English, then translated it into Russian. It is anything but clinical, and deliciously nuanced. Finally, never underestimate the effect of a good editor on a rambling, unruly manuscript--publishing is a collective effort.
I actually agree. I just find that sometimes Rand does actually produce a literary unit that makes me stand up and say, "That's actually pretty good." However, her awkward and purely bad moments greatly outnumber the times where she hits the mark. I can't remember the exact wording of the simile, but there's a line in Atlas Shrugged where she compares the face of Rearden's secretary to an office machine.
or the childishly allegorical plot
One of Rand's glaring weaknesses is that her books are choke-full of some of the worst strawmen to ever grace modern discourse. The "bad guys" in her novels rarely have any motivation for what they do other than their blind belief that collectivism is good and making profit or being an individual is bad. Of course, most people, when either considered as individuals or as a group, never act this way. Most people have some sort of rationality, flawed or not, driving what they do and what they believe (which is ironic considering Rand's obsession with being rational).
As far as a comparison between Rand and Marx - they do exist pretty much at the exact opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, which warrants some comparison of political thinking. However, Marx's intellectual output is much more wide-reaching than Rand's. While communism was a failure, Marx produced an intellectual paradigm that continues to have a big influence on the social sciences and humanities. Hopefully I'm not being too political, but people like David Horowitz think that the academy is full of Marxists. Aside from some cherry-picked examples, it really isn't. It's just that a lot of academics conduct research or write papers using a conflict theory perspective, which Marx originated. While many of them fall on the left side of the spectrum, they aren't necessarily looking to overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize the means of production, at least in my experience.
Rand's influence seems to begin and end in Objectivist circles. What I mean by that is she hasn't really influenced further scholarship or thinking (obviously she has an influence insofar as individuals finding meaning in her works as evidence by her book sales). She has some influence on libertarianism, but there's always been an animosity between Objectivists and libertarians, which I find somewhat puzzling. Rand and William Buckley, who was considered to be at the vanguard of conservative thought, famously derided each other. Most trained philosophers don't give serious attention to any of Rand's work. While Leonard Peikoff is a trained philosopher, he was actually an Objectivist before he went to school for philosophy. I don't think most philosophers would enter grad school and then "come to" Objectivism during or after their studies (but hey, I could be wrong there). I suppose it could be argued that Rand isn't given much credence in philosophy because of a political or ideological bias against her work, but it's been my experience that philosophers and political scientists treat Robert Nozick's work with quite a bit of respect, even if they don't agree with it. Also, you're not getting out of any undergrad philosophy program without some discussion of Nietzsche, who was the premiere individualist philosopher.
