I am currently working towards a BA in English from Queen Mary, University of London. I am twenty years old and finishing up my second year this month. I was introduced to free-market economics by a teacher in high school, who caught on to the fact that I consistently argued a classical liberal perspective in his class, although at that point I had never heard of classical liberalism or Austrian economics. He got me following the professors at George Mason University (Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Peter Boettke, Russ Roberts, etc) and from there I became interested in free-market economics and gained familiarity with the work of the Austrian school. Literature, however, was my first love, and it was not until I began reading Ayn Rand that I consciously connected my love of literature with what I had previously thought of as merely an economic philosophy. It was then that I began to appreciate the broader cultural significance of these ideas. It was Hayek's, "The Intellectuals and Socialism" that finally convinced me that many of the problems I saw in society were, fundamentally, not problems with public policy but a deeper cultural issue that art and literature had the power to change.
When I began studying literature at university I was put-off (to put it lightly) by the ways I was being taught to analyse literature and surprised by how heavily biased literary criticism was to Marxist assumptions about people and society. I am currently working on a project that challenges the Marxist paradigm through which literary critics tend to analyse literature by proposing a way to approach literature that is grounded within the understanding of society proposed by Hayek and similar thinkers.
Thank you for inviting me to Austrian Economics and Literature and I look forward to sharing ideas with all of you!
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