Abstract
The paper aims at exploring Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), precisely, his criticism of the civilized rules by which the World State citizens must abide. Those rules are, characteristically, at odds with the normal human ways of life that the writer textually describes as savage. The paper intends to examine the two concepts of civilization and savageness as far as Huxley's utopian brave world is concerned. Moreover, it tries to underscore, by means of juxtaposing the discussion of the two worlds representing each of the two concepts throughout the second and the third sections of the paper, the irony underlying their new inverted meanings.
Highlights
The issues that the twentieth-century British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) addressed in his novel Brave New World (1932) seemed urgent during the post-World War era, “when governments sought scientific and technological progress at all costs”. [1] Huxley seemed to witness with dismay the sweeping victory of the matter over the spirit, which came as a result of what the eighteenth-century rationalists believed to be the prevalence of Reason
Huxley must have in mind the image of Europe left in ruins after the First World War, a world that was torn between nationalistic radicalisms on the left and on the right
What crucially aggravates John's pain under oppression is the inner and outer isolation he and his like are forced to suffer from, because they, unlike others, choose to attach a certain meaningful definition to their existence. When he wrote his Brave New World, Aldous Huxley must have had in mind the idea of dramatizing how a world without sickness, disease, pain, or any other human limitation, looks like
Summary
The issues that the twentieth-century British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) addressed in his novel Brave New World (1932) seemed urgent during the post-World War era, “when governments sought scientific and technological progress at all costs”. [1] Huxley seemed to witness with dismay the sweeping victory of the matter over the spirit, which came as a result of what the eighteenth-century rationalists believed to be the prevalence of Reason. [14] Though Huxley, in Arnold Kettle’s perspective, most often falls short of presenting a “cross section of English society of the late nineteen-twenties", [15] and though Brave New World was hardly acclaimed by critics and reviewers who saw it as a boring and "overly simplistic" tale whose vision, though interesting, was "irrelevant and unoriginal" [16], Huxley’s 1932 masterpiece was a success. It basically parodies the utopian novel and portrays a society “where. Sexual permissiveness, technological development, selective breeding and the debasement of popular culture are carried to the limit, creating a world of insipid, conformist mediocrity”. [17] The world that Huxley intends his readers to envision is invariably materialistic, which may suggest that the book carries some undertones in support of certain spiritual aspects that this world purposefully disregards
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