Enhance your love of literature by viewing it through a philosophic lens.

What if the stories you love could offer even more meaning, more inspiration, more fuel for living? They can. This course will show you how to deepen your love of literature by approaching it philosophically.

Literature uniquely dramatizes the values that shape human life. Through the integrated elements of plot, character, style, and theme, it explores the deepest questions about what it means to live, to struggle, to triumph.

By examining literature philosophically, you’ll gain a richer understanding of stories and characters as well as the ideas and choices that cause people to act as they do. This approach not only enhances your appreciation of great stories, it also teaches you to think more clearly and live more deliberately.

Guided by Angel Walker-Werth and co-instructors Carrie-Ann Biondi, Tim White, Luc Travers, and Timothy Sandefur, this course will explore key scenes and themes from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and We the Living, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and a selection of powerful poems and short stories. (The poems, short stories, and excerpts will be provided prior to the relevant session.)

If you love literature—and want to love it even more—this course is for you.

Meet Your Instructors

Angelica Walker-Werth

Angelica Walker-Werth is a fellow and programs manager at Objective Standard Institute, an associate editor and writer for The Objective Standard, and an Ayn Rand Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. Her roles at OSI include managing the junior fellowship and Intellectual Accelerator Programs, developing and administering courses, and mentoring. She is a voracious reader of fiction in her spare time and writes about philosophic ideas in fiction on Substack and makes videos about those things on YouTube.

Luc Travers

Luc Travers is the author of Stories in Paint: 50 Moving Artworks from American Museums and Touching The Art: A Guide to Enjoying Art at a Museum. He leads art museum tours around the world and teaches art appreciation and literature to all ages. Learn more about his work at www.TouchingTheArt.com.

Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute and is the author of several books, including The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law (2010), The Conscience of The Constitution (2014), The Permission Society (2016), Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man (2018), and The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski: The Life and Ideas of a Popular Science Icon (2019). His forthcoming book is on the efforts of Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand to defend liberty in an age of tyranny. He is a contributing editor at The Objective Standard.

Carrie-Ann Biondi

Carrie-Ann Biondi, a philosopher with more than two decades of teaching experience, specializes in Ancient Greek philosophy, particularly the ideas of Aristotle. She is an adolescent program manager and coach at Higher Ground Education and a humanities guide for the Academy of Thought and Industry. She also serves as book review editor at Reason Papers. Her works have been published in many anthologies and journals, including The Objective Standard.

Tim White

Tim White is an award-winning author of eight books, hundreds of short stories, more than fifty TTRPG campaigns, and more than one thousand nonfiction articles and essays. He also edits fiction and nonfiction on a freelance basis, and he is a zealous crusader for the unique power of storytelling to promote human flourishing. He owns an escape room venue in Arizona, where he designs and builds every prop and puzzle in-house. For more information, please visit TimWhiteWriting.com