![]() ![]() In most cases, the originals continue to have more life than Huxley’s cynical, world-weary appropriations, but Brave New World clearly lives on.īrave New World has been adapted into a couple of TV movies but never as a theatrical film, which seems right, as the book on its own doesn’t make for a very good movie. Huxley took the title, of course, from Miranda’s speech in The Tempest, where she gushes in admiration, “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world/That has such people in’t!” Huxley’s titles often mined other English writers for his titles (Tennyson for After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Shakespeare again for Time Must Have a Stop, Marlowe for Antic Hay, Milton for Eyeless in Gaza). Huxley’s dystopia is a portrait of the mindlessness that results from brainwashing and distraction by constant amusement and self-gratification. ![]() One goal for this series is to inspire colleges and universities to choose better books for their freshman reading programs, and to show how classic books can be relevant to college students today. The National Association of Scholars has opened a new series, “ Revisiting the Classics,” in which we are inviting our members and friends to read and reflect on a book that has stood the test of time, and to consider how it bears on contemporary ideas. I recently read Brave New World for the first time, not only because I have been working my way through some of the landmarks of the wide terrain of dystopian novels, but also from an interest in looking back at a classic to see what it has to say about the present day. Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) that “In America, Orwell’s prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley’s are well under way toward being realized.” This is because, Postman wrote, “In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. Orwell was a student of Huxley’s, and Brave New World and 1984 are often juxtaposed as the two leading works of fiction on technology and society by twentieth century British authors. ![]() But while, in light of this, many commenters have compared the NSA to Big Brother, there is perhaps a better metaphor for our present state in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Last summer’s revelations by Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency (NSA) “targets the communications of everyone” have brought to the forefront fears that we may now be living in a surveillance state similar to the one George Orwell rendered in his dark dystopia 1984. ![]()
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