Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley &Brave New World

“Oh, Brave New World that has such people in it!”

Aldous Huxley

Born British but moved to California

Was a journalist and a symbolist poet early in his career

Aldous Huxley

Became a “prophet of doom for the cult of the amusing”—moved away from realism to make ideas the central point in his stories

Scrutinized moral decadence of modern society’s effect on the “whole” man. (D.H. Lawrence?)

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World (1932) abandoned his view of evil as a “mildly amusing social phenomenon” and identified it with materialism and sensuality

Aldous Huxley

Wrote a pseudo-sequel—Brave New World Revisited, a diatribe against overpopulation and over consumption.

Died Nov. 22, 1963—the same day JFK was assassinated.

UTOPIA

A fiction describing an ideal imaginary world.

From Sir Thomas More’s Utopia written in Latin in 1516 describing a perfect political state

Literally means “good place”

DYSTOPIALiterally “bad place”Imaginary worlds, usually in the future, that

are less than idealPresent tendencies are carried out to their

intensely unpleasant culminationsMost famous dystopic stories are George

Orwell’s 1984, & Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Other dystopic novels and works:

Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (Soylent Green)


Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner)


William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s Logan’s Run


Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta


The Matrix

NOBLE SAVAGE

The idea that primitive human beings are naturally good and that whatever evil they develop is the product of the corrupting action of civilization.

“Everything is well when it comes fresh from the hands of the Maker; everything degenerates in the hand of Man.” Rousseau

NOBLE SAVAGE

Major works that include the noble savage:Edgar Rice Burroughs’

Tarzan of the ApesRudyard Kipling’s MowgliRobert E. Howard’s Conan

the Barbarian

Education

Aldous Huxley