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 and Alternative Spirituality offers an analysis of Huxley's spiritual interests, spanning both mysticism and Western esotericism. With this methodology, Jake Poller generates new ...insights into Huxley's work and draws revealing parallels between Huxley's ideas and the New Age.
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.
Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World ...and The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling that Aldous Huxley was once a friend of her father's until the summer of 2001 when she discovered a box of her dad's old photographs. For years in the 1940s and '50s, her father had meticulously photographed human hands in the hope of developing a science of predicting human aptitudes and even mental illness. In the box, along with all the other hand images, was one with the name of Aldous Huxley on the back. How was it possible for two such unlikely people to cross paths--her aircraft-engineer father and the famous author?This question sparked a journalist's quest to understand what clearly seemed to be a little-known interest of Aldous Huxley. Through interviews, road trips, and family documents, the author reconstructs a time peaking in mid-1950s Los Angeles when Huxley experimented with psychedelic substances, ran afoul of gatekeepers, and advocated responsible use of such hallucinogens to treat mental illness as well as to achieve states of mind called mystical. Because the author's father had studied hundreds of hands, including those of schizophrenics, he was invited into Huxley's research and discussion circle.This intriguing narrative about the early psychedelic era throws new light on one of the 20th-century's foremost intellectuals, showing that his experiments in consciousness presaged pivotal scientific research underway today.
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...
Chemist Alexander Parke adapted a newly discovered chemical with the pungent odor of rotten eggs to the task of making gooey natural rubber into a material that could be molded and shaped into any ...one of a thousand products—tires, balls, infant pacifiers, gloves, etc.—in the expanding industrial and consumer markets. Blanc details this "rising industry" in exquisite detail, identifying a host of interlocking international concerns that manufactured viscose, the basis for rayon and other CS2 products, despite the growing attention of a handful of researchers and political organizations that saw in the production process an important threat to the health of workers. ...during the 1930s, with an economic depression and the rise of German Fascism, both the left and the right saw the products of CS2 as ripe symbols of broader labor and social struggles.
This article aims to discuss modernist literary patronage in order to comment on the myths of modernism in a twofold manner. Firstly, the form patrons take in the cultural imaginary of modernist ...writers directly influences the final versions of their works. Thinly veiled versions of patrons appear time and again in various modernist novels, contributing to the way patrons are perceived in real-life and academic discourse as well. By being reduced to lionhunters or two-dimensional characters in romans a clef, patrons are mythologised, which allows writers to navigate the difficult power dynamics and expectations of literary patronage more easily. Secondly, studying the way patrons are written and talked about allows us to critically engage another, bigger myth of modernism: that of the author and their creative dominance. By looking at Lady Ottoline Morrell, a modernist patron, and her beneficiaries, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley among others, this paper provides a novel perspective on modernist works and their conception.
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