Abstract
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936) is usually considered Huxley’s most complex work; it makes a break with his social novels of the twenties and establishes him as a proponent of mysticism. However, ...scholarly analyses of this novel are mostly limited to its non‐linear structure and mystical passages. This paper analyzes epiphanies as important structural and thematic elements of
Eyeless in Gaza
. Our focus is not only on Anthony Beavis as a protagonist, but also on minor characters such as Helen Ledwidge and Brian Foxe. This paper shows that epiphanies in
Eyeless in Gaza
anticipate the major ideas of
The Perennial Philosophy
and
The Doors of Perception
. We also indicate that Huxley’s use of epiphanies defines his views on Romantic pantheism and positions his literature in the Modernist context.
La ficción distópica es un género discursivo conformado por productos culturales (textos literarios, películas, series) orientados a producir un tipo particular de efectos de sentido en el lector ...modelo: idealmente, al consumirlos, los lectores serán capaces de realizar una evaluación crítica de sus circunstancias sociopolíticas. Por lo tanto, la ficción distópica, que es un discurso ficcional, pretende ser motor del cambio sociopolítico mediante la intervención en la esfera discursiva de lo no ficcional. Este artículo se aproxima al género de la ficción distópica en literatura desde una perspectiva semiótica. Específicamente, estudia el tipo de imaginación y de construcción de mundos posibles que lo definen. La tesis que presenta es que la ficción distópica se caracteriza por una construcción de futuros que son plausibles, esto es, que tienen un anclaje en la realidad tal cual es y que, por lo tanto, son viables, a diferencia de lo que ocurre en la ciencia ficción.
Aldous Huxley was deeply influenced in his formative years by the East, and this is key to understanding his later evolution as a writer. Towards an exploration of this, the current study analyses ...the intellectual and cultural context of Europe at the time, with special attention to European writers and intellectuals who had an influence on Huxley and who thus helped to pave the way for his interest in the East and oriental matters early in his life, without ignoring the influence that they would also have on him in later years. Secondly, Orientalism is addressed both as an influence on Huxley and as a modern critical theory, with the aim of demonstrating the author’s modernity in light of this. Finally, the study analyses the work
Jesting Pilate
, not only in terms of its oriental prospects and proclivity as an intellectual travel book, but also as a means of tracing the oriental elements therein as determining factors in Huxley’s seminal stage during his European years. This is seen as a necessary amalgam, and one that would be further developed in his later output, during the so-called American years.
This article explores Aldous Huxley's understanding of the self, reading him as both participant in the early century modernist quest to explore the fractured nature of subjectivity, and resistor of ...that quest's aesthetic implications. Huxley's authorial focus on externality while his peers probed the interior, I argue, bears a passing resemblance to the aesthetics of high modernist figures such as Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme, but speaks to an optimistic antidote to their pessimism about the limits of human capability. Tracing his tonal development from sardonic and satirical in the 1920s to affirmative, didactic and therapeutic in run up to World War Two, I discuss his humanist aims in the context of an enduring anti-humanist inflection. At the same time, I show that inflection to have involved a destabilising of selfhood for the purpose of rebuilding, rather than the more usual modernist anti-humanist expression of its limitations. What were, in some ways, the irrational and deviant systems of psychic research, Theosophy, Western mysticism and Eastern religion provided Huxley with a model for thinking about how the self might be conceived of as a potentially complete and rational agent - albeit with a reconstructed consciousness that was broadened, expanded and re-located.
Mohsin Hamid’s novel, Exit West (2017) takes place in a world where magical doorways allow refugees passage between countries. Following the couple Saeed and Nadia – refugees from an unnamed city ...undergoing fundamentalist insurrection – the novel explores their grappling amid different political tensions. While commentators have discussed the way Hamid re-frames migration as form of connectivity, and the portals as utopian forms of escape, this article investigates the economic specificities of such connectivity, through three near-future communities that Hamid imagines for Nadia and Saeed: a Kensington townhouse reclaimed by refugees, the “London Halo” work-for-housing program, and the shanty city of Marin, San Francisco. These collectives defy the logic of capitalist realism (Fisher). In this way, utopian potential exists within the novel both in terms of magical thinking against the system (Adorno) and as embodied forms of solidarity amid crisis (Žižek and Jameson).
From its inception in Plato’s Republic and revival in Thomas More’s Utopia, the concept of a perfect (or as More originally put it in a qualification often lost, “best”) form of a republic has been ...dogged by the spectres of hypocrisy, contradiction, and authoritarianism. However, the matter is more complicated than a simple declaration that utopias provide a vehicle for totalitarian fantasy, that totalitarian governments inevitably portray themselves as creating a utopia. While today’s readers, at a comfortable distance from the early sixteenth century, may bridle at the lack of privacy, or at the ideological coerciveness in More’s Utopia, that does not eradicate how, in Walter Kendrick’s words, “what for us are problems are for them solutions.” It can be argued that the negative elements are a response to social ills. The same goes for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. While the negatives in all three fictions undermine or put into question the positives, our realization that the authors also intended the negatives as genuine attempts at resolving genuine problems that cause untold misery invites us to complicate our judgments. The undermining is itself undermined.
With Beckett's breath as form and text as content, with inhalation and exhalation the minimal, "radically economic representation of human life," Gaynor foregrounds what he calls the "cold music from ...which the messy, dreadful doings of the text are excluded, even if one cannot exist without the other." ...Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Florida. What strikes this reader as most compelling about Wegner's essay are three things: the way the author works with, on, and against Jameson's well-known use of the term post-modernism; his uniquely two-fold version of performatives that are both grounded in history and tethered to the imaginative experience of reading science fiction; and finally, the pressure necessarily placed on singularity in all of this. Besides the innumerable insights he gleans from the translation of the X-Men comic books to the big screen, his instructive thoughts on method, the symptom and superstructure, and beyond the temporal chiasm engineered by science fiction make it clear that futurity today is in short supply for as many reasons as there are singular souls to think it.
In Aldous Huxley's science fiction entitled Brave New World (1932) presents a Utopian future based on science and technology. He presents the future world governed by the progress of science and its ...discoveries. In this world babies are produced in laboratories and are so conditioned that they are devoid of emotions and morality. He warns us by presenting the production of babies in laboratories, who grew without any moral values in them. In this world, there is no crime, no immorality. Science has destroyed all the evil elements in man. The novel presents two worlds. One is the ideal scientific world and other is the ideal primitive world. Man has to choose between these two worlds. The novelist seems to be on the side of the primitive world and opposes the scientific world.
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