In January, 2018, UK Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a ministerial lead on loneliness “to address the loneliness endured by the elderly, by carers, by those who have lost loved ones—people who ...have no one to talk to or share their thoughts and experiences with”.In this way, Ball's work is an intricate study of the debilitating effects of loneliness: a 16-year-old boy wants to end his current life because he is “deeply misunderstood, right from the get-go”; an otherwise healthy wife and mother seeks the Cure because the “duration of her interest in her life was shorter than the duration of her life”....his mind is so “fogged” that he requires lifelong assistance.
Aldous Huxley: social anarchist Flaherty, Seamus
Journal of political ideologies,
05/2022, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article shows that in the years between 1937 and 1962 Aldous Huxley adopted a species of anarchism. It demonstrates, first, how in espousing gradualism and pacifism, in stressing the ...significance of education and meditation as agents of social change, in seeking to construct intentional communities in the here and now, as well as build on pre-existing examples of 'anarchy in action' such as consumer and producer cooperatives, in taking a measured view of the state, not rejecting the institution on principle, but only its coercive form, and in making sex central to his vision of utopia as an essential ingredient of a happy and sustainable life, Huxley anticipated the 'new' anarchism of the postwar era. Second, it argues that, in rejecting notions of 'normal' subjectivity, in seeing the human subject as fundamentally irrational, in viewing power as coextensive with society itself, as a relationship that can only be managed as opposed to abolished, in repudiating grand theory or metanarratives in favour of 'micro-politics', and in viewing science as both epistemologically flawed and potentially oppressive, Huxley anticipated postanarchism. Despite his reluctance to adopt a label, it is the contention of this article that Huxley ought to be considered a social anarchist.
Better Futures Needed James, Simon J
Modern fiction studies,
06/2022, Letnik:
68, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Both of the books reviewed consider the contemporaneity and the current relevance of the literary utopia and dystopia. Adam Stock's Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought traces the history ...of the dystopia by examining both well-known and less familiar twentieth-century literary texts, demonstrating how they provoke a counterfactual reflection on the social and cultural politics of their readers' present. Caroline Edwards's Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel focusses on more recent literary fiction, tracing themes of hopefulness and community as forms of resistance to hegemonic capitalism.
I examine the often-denigrated concept of the novel of ideas from its inception and critical decline to its relatively recent revival. Using a variant of the exploitation-exploration dilemma in ...psychology, I suggest that early usage referred to works that exploit philosophical principles—or better, enact them—by setting philosophical positions in conflict. By contrast, use of the concept for more recent works sees characters and plots exploring philosophical stances. The shift corresponds with the greater attention paid to complexity and ambiguity that are hallmarks of continental philosophy and neopragmatism, and with it greater need to explore philosophical stances through fiction.
Published as part of the book series Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, Maxim Shadurski’s monograph The Nationality of Utopia: H. G. Wells, England, and the World State meets two ...major challenges. Firstly, this book offers original insights despite the density of scholarly works already devoted to Wells and utopia. The author’s focus is on two seemingly paradoxical notions which inform Wells’s vision of utopia, Englishness and universalism, which Shadurski redefines as complem...
Machines for Living builds on Rosner's previous book Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2008) to show, by means of detailed examination of the ways in which "literary and architectural ...form share design principles," how writers including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, and the less expected Ivy Compton-Burnett responded to modernity's preoccupations with minimalism, hygiene, and domestic innovation (21). The ontological foundation for the self-consciousness of modernity is based on ideas of change, although the term "modern" was not used in the current sense until the sixteenth century.1 While not really showing how modernism's "new vocabulary of form substantially derived from non-literary discourses of modernity" (why do publishers insist that book proposals are always "new"?), Rosner's is a much more significant offering—a genuinely wide-ranging, interdisciplinary compass of early twentieth-century literary and cultural formations (18). Intriguingly, and ironically, Jourdain copied out a key passage from Clive Bell's Art, calling for simplification in architecture, on the back of a Country Life article (75). While often a gregarious hostess, Woolf designed and had built her ground floor bedroom with no internal door to the house as well as a writing lodge fully detached from the house at the end of a garden path.
The two worlds created by Padmanabhan have further significance in that they demonstrate how dystopia is embedded in reality, making it more relevant to the contemporary audience. Harvest sets itself ...up as a fictional dystopia while keeping enough reality for the contemporaries to recognize; Lights Out , on the contrary, begins as a realistic drawing room drama that initiates itself from a social incident, but reaches out to include dystopian qualities bad enough for the audience to want to deny its practicality. … Although by definition neither utopia nor dystopia can exist, Padmanabhan's depiction of dystopian societies that touch the quotidian life strengthens her commentary and critique on the existing world.
While many readers know Aldous Huxley as the author of Brave New World, few know him as a philosopher. Even fewer readers are aware of his extensive knowledge of Eastern philosophy and the ways in ...which he perceives epistemological and ethical parallels between Eastern thought and Western philosophy. This essay freshly unveils this unexpected part of Huxley by investigating his dialogue with a classical Chinese philosophy called Taoism and the ways in which Taoism contributes to the formation of his most important philosophical treatise The Perennial Philosophy (1946), written as a book of global philosophy.
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