- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310256
- eISBN:
- 9781846312557
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846310256.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Aldous Huxley was a novelist and essayist who was born into a family of immense intellectual achievement. This chapter first discusses Huxley's aesthetic approach to social affairs and his alignment ...
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Aldous Huxley was a novelist and essayist who was born into a family of immense intellectual achievement. This chapter first discusses Huxley's aesthetic approach to social affairs and his alignment with Oscar Wilde's anarchism. It then explores the intellectual background of his book, Brave New World. Finally, the chapter examines his advocacy of left libertarianism and his declaration for pacifism.Less
Aldous Huxley was a novelist and essayist who was born into a family of immense intellectual achievement. This chapter first discusses Huxley's aesthetic approach to social affairs and his alignment with Oscar Wilde's anarchism. It then explores the intellectual background of his book, Brave New World. Finally, the chapter examines his advocacy of left libertarianism and his declaration for pacifism.
DAVID BRADSHAW
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182894
- eISBN:
- 9780191673917
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182894.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Lawrence was the recipient of at least six letters, a post card, two calendars, a nickel cigarette case, and some poems from ‘the irrepressible Durham miner man’, all designed to lure the ailing ...
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Lawrence was the recipient of at least six letters, a post card, two calendars, a nickel cigarette case, and some poems from ‘the irrepressible Durham miner man’, all designed to lure the ailing novelist to Willington. Aldous Huxley and Lawrence were close friends during the last three years of Lawrence's life, and it seems certain that both Wilson and the widely reported social and industrial problems of the mining regions would have been discussed by the two novelists. When Huxley was invited to Willington shortly after Lawrence's death, he responded favourably, telling Wilson that his description of the conditions in the Durham area was ‘very depressing’. Huxley wrote on how to solve the current political crisis. He repeatedly sanctioned the bypassing of parliamentary opposition to Soviet-style planning as a matter of the utmost gravity and expedience. There is certainly enough evidence to suggest that his interest in eugenics was no less fervid than that of his fellow-writers.Less
Lawrence was the recipient of at least six letters, a post card, two calendars, a nickel cigarette case, and some poems from ‘the irrepressible Durham miner man’, all designed to lure the ailing novelist to Willington. Aldous Huxley and Lawrence were close friends during the last three years of Lawrence's life, and it seems certain that both Wilson and the widely reported social and industrial problems of the mining regions would have been discussed by the two novelists. When Huxley was invited to Willington shortly after Lawrence's death, he responded favourably, telling Wilson that his description of the conditions in the Durham area was ‘very depressing’. Huxley wrote on how to solve the current political crisis. He repeatedly sanctioned the bypassing of parliamentary opposition to Soviet-style planning as a matter of the utmost gravity and expedience. There is certainly enough evidence to suggest that his interest in eugenics was no less fervid than that of his fellow-writers.
Jonathan Foltz
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190676490
- eISBN:
- 9780190676520
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190676490.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter tracks film’s role in rewriting the possibilities of novelistic irony. It focuses on the work of Aldous Huxley, the period’s most well-known satirist, who relocated to Hollywood in the ...
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This chapter tracks film’s role in rewriting the possibilities of novelistic irony. It focuses on the work of Aldous Huxley, the period’s most well-known satirist, who relocated to Hollywood in the 1930s for a disastrous career as a screenwriter. As Huxley reflected in a number of key essays on the medium, the cinema achieves automatically what writers often labor to express. It is a medium, he says, in which “miracles are easily performed”—a medium in which miracles are no longer miracles, beauty no longer beautiful. Yet Huxley was a writer perversely willing to draw upon that unbeautiful energy, writing the majority of his late dystopian novel, Ape and Essence (1948), in the hybrid form of a screenplay. In offering a novelistic burlesque of modernity’s most abject art, Huxley casts doubt on the ability of art in general to comprehend the culture of which it is a part.Less
This chapter tracks film’s role in rewriting the possibilities of novelistic irony. It focuses on the work of Aldous Huxley, the period’s most well-known satirist, who relocated to Hollywood in the 1930s for a disastrous career as a screenwriter. As Huxley reflected in a number of key essays on the medium, the cinema achieves automatically what writers often labor to express. It is a medium, he says, in which “miracles are easily performed”—a medium in which miracles are no longer miracles, beauty no longer beautiful. Yet Huxley was a writer perversely willing to draw upon that unbeautiful energy, writing the majority of his late dystopian novel, Ape and Essence (1948), in the hybrid form of a screenplay. In offering a novelistic burlesque of modernity’s most abject art, Huxley casts doubt on the ability of art in general to comprehend the culture of which it is a part.
Gregory Claeys
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198785682
- eISBN:
- 9780191827471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198785682.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas, World Modern History
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) remains one of the most popular dystopian texts, second only to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in defining the emerging genre of dystopia. The work is usually ...
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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) remains one of the most popular dystopian texts, second only to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in defining the emerging genre of dystopia. The work is usually read as a satire on eugenics. But it addresses a wide variety of themes so successfully as to remain fascinating to later modern readers. This chapter contextualizes the work, and illustrates the degree to which it should be read as, in part, an anti-Bolshevik novel. The development of Huxley’s ideas after this, up to his utopia, Island (1962), is also assessed in terms of a series of efforts to confront the themes of his greatest work.Less
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) remains one of the most popular dystopian texts, second only to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in defining the emerging genre of dystopia. The work is usually read as a satire on eugenics. But it addresses a wide variety of themes so successfully as to remain fascinating to later modern readers. This chapter contextualizes the work, and illustrates the degree to which it should be read as, in part, an anti-Bolshevik novel. The development of Huxley’s ideas after this, up to his utopia, Island (1962), is also assessed in terms of a series of efforts to confront the themes of his greatest work.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even ...
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The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.Less
The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.
Christopher Partridge
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190459116
- eISBN:
- 9780190459147
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190459116.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
In 1956, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term “psychedelic.” This chapter provides an analysis of the events that led up to Huxley’s psychedelic ...
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In 1956, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term “psychedelic.” This chapter provides an analysis of the events that led up to Huxley’s psychedelic epiphany under the influence of mescaline, including Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD and subsequent psychedelic research. Particular attention is given to Huxley’s interpretation of the psychedelic state. This is important because Huxley was a catalytic figure at an important moment in the postwar Western world and his ideas had a formative influence on the culture of the 1960s. There is also analysis of R. C. Zaehner’s strident critique of Huxley’s thesis.Less
In 1956, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term “psychedelic.” This chapter provides an analysis of the events that led up to Huxley’s psychedelic epiphany under the influence of mescaline, including Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD and subsequent psychedelic research. Particular attention is given to Huxley’s interpretation of the psychedelic state. This is important because Huxley was a catalytic figure at an important moment in the postwar Western world and his ideas had a formative influence on the culture of the 1960s. There is also analysis of R. C. Zaehner’s strident critique of Huxley’s thesis.
Morag Shiach
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748647316
- eISBN:
- 9780748684380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647316.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In ‘“Pleasure too often repeated”: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity’, Morag Shiach focuses on three kinds of Huxleyan repetition: quotation, circulating sexual energies and social rituals. Huxley’s ...
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In ‘“Pleasure too often repeated”: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity’, Morag Shiach focuses on three kinds of Huxleyan repetition: quotation, circulating sexual energies and social rituals. Huxley’s ‘accumulating drops of allusion and quotation’ represent not only a literary style but also ‘the characteristic universe’ of his fictional parties, ‘where meaning emerges from the cumulative drops of fragmented conversation and quotation rather than presenting itself as continuous or coherent’. Serial sexual encounters at parties, together with the taking of narcotics, figure ‘paralysis and obsessive return’, while the ‘repetitions and rituals’ of ‘enforced sociability’ occasion psychic damage. Linking these symptoms in Crome Yellow (1921), Point Counter Point (1928) and Brave New World (1932) to Huxley’s vision of modernity, Shiach explores how Huxley’s textual strategies mimic party behaviours.Less
In ‘“Pleasure too often repeated”: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity’, Morag Shiach focuses on three kinds of Huxleyan repetition: quotation, circulating sexual energies and social rituals. Huxley’s ‘accumulating drops of allusion and quotation’ represent not only a literary style but also ‘the characteristic universe’ of his fictional parties, ‘where meaning emerges from the cumulative drops of fragmented conversation and quotation rather than presenting itself as continuous or coherent’. Serial sexual encounters at parties, together with the taking of narcotics, figure ‘paralysis and obsessive return’, while the ‘repetitions and rituals’ of ‘enforced sociability’ occasion psychic damage. Linking these symptoms in Crome Yellow (1921), Point Counter Point (1928) and Brave New World (1932) to Huxley’s vision of modernity, Shiach explores how Huxley’s textual strategies mimic party behaviours.
Laura Frost
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231152723
- eISBN:
- 9780231526463
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231152723.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines the intricate balance of pleasure and unpleasure in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. In particular, it considers the dense composite of references around the “feelies” in ...
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This chapter examines the intricate balance of pleasure and unpleasure in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. In particular, it considers the dense composite of references around the “feelies” in Brave New World, from a popular women's romance novel to William Shakespeare to race cinema and nature documentaries. It looks at Huxley's vision of futurity, or, as he called it, a “negative utopia,” that is paradoxically organized around pleasure. Just as D. H. Lawrence's work registers the attraction of the material he claims to reject, the engineered pleasures in Brave New World, including the feelies, exert a frivolous, sleazy magnetism that often contradicts the novel's argument against careless hedonism. The totalitarian culture that is meant to be repellent is secured by a wide variety of vernacular pleasures that are, from a readerly perspective, paradoxically engaging. The chapter explains how this irony is extended in Huxley's subsequent adaptation of Brave New World to a musical comedy.Less
This chapter examines the intricate balance of pleasure and unpleasure in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. In particular, it considers the dense composite of references around the “feelies” in Brave New World, from a popular women's romance novel to William Shakespeare to race cinema and nature documentaries. It looks at Huxley's vision of futurity, or, as he called it, a “negative utopia,” that is paradoxically organized around pleasure. Just as D. H. Lawrence's work registers the attraction of the material he claims to reject, the engineered pleasures in Brave New World, including the feelies, exert a frivolous, sleazy magnetism that often contradicts the novel's argument against careless hedonism. The totalitarian culture that is meant to be repellent is secured by a wide variety of vernacular pleasures that are, from a readerly perspective, paradoxically engaging. The chapter explains how this irony is extended in Huxley's subsequent adaptation of Brave New World to a musical comedy.
Genevieve Abravanel
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199754458
- eISBN:
- 9780199933143
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199754458.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, World Literature
In the period shortly after the First World War, the vast majority of films viewed in Britain and its Empire came from America. This worrisome state of affairs led some British politicians, cultural ...
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In the period shortly after the First World War, the vast majority of films viewed in Britain and its Empire came from America. This worrisome state of affairs led some British politicians, cultural critics, and writers to assert in all seriousness that Hollywood film had the potential to undermine the British Empire. This chapter introduces the concept of the “entertainment empire” in order to explain how some in Britain perceived American entertainment as a new kind of imperialism, one based less on colonial occupation and more on the marketing of mass-reproduced leisure. The chapter further considers how a group of modernist film critics including H.D., Bryher, and Kenneth Macpherson recast the aesthetic philosophy of their pioneering journal, Close Up, in reaction to the new sounds of Hollywood.Less
In the period shortly after the First World War, the vast majority of films viewed in Britain and its Empire came from America. This worrisome state of affairs led some British politicians, cultural critics, and writers to assert in all seriousness that Hollywood film had the potential to undermine the British Empire. This chapter introduces the concept of the “entertainment empire” in order to explain how some in Britain perceived American entertainment as a new kind of imperialism, one based less on colonial occupation and more on the marketing of mass-reproduced leisure. The chapter further considers how a group of modernist film critics including H.D., Bryher, and Kenneth Macpherson recast the aesthetic philosophy of their pioneering journal, Close Up, in reaction to the new sounds of Hollywood.
Nathan Waddell
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198816706
- eISBN:
- 9780191858338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198816706.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter discusses the music of Beethoven’s so-called ‘late’ period and its representation in the work of Aldous Huxley, among others. Beethoven’s music may or may not embody values over which ...
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This chapter discusses the music of Beethoven’s so-called ‘late’ period and its representation in the work of Aldous Huxley, among others. Beethoven’s music may or may not embody values over which the politics of authoritarianism arguably can never fully or finally triumph, but it is hard to see what that music can do, practically speaking, when faced with the violent realities of authoritarianism ‘on the ground’: vitriol, fists, weapons, bombs, and tanks. Huxley managed to bring these emphases into a distinctive dialogue with the idea of Beethovenian conventionality. This chapter considers how his most modernist novel, Point Counter Point (1928), affirms the value of Beethoven’s late music; questions the terms of the inter-war musicological consensus which did so much to put that music on a high-cultural pedestal; and uses the implied background of the Beethoven centenary celebrations to dispute the redemptive power of Beethovenolatry in an age of authoritarian entrenchment.Less
This chapter discusses the music of Beethoven’s so-called ‘late’ period and its representation in the work of Aldous Huxley, among others. Beethoven’s music may or may not embody values over which the politics of authoritarianism arguably can never fully or finally triumph, but it is hard to see what that music can do, practically speaking, when faced with the violent realities of authoritarianism ‘on the ground’: vitriol, fists, weapons, bombs, and tanks. Huxley managed to bring these emphases into a distinctive dialogue with the idea of Beethovenian conventionality. This chapter considers how his most modernist novel, Point Counter Point (1928), affirms the value of Beethoven’s late music; questions the terms of the inter-war musicological consensus which did so much to put that music on a high-cultural pedestal; and uses the implied background of the Beethoven centenary celebrations to dispute the redemptive power of Beethovenolatry in an age of authoritarian entrenchment.
David Ayers
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780748647330
- eISBN:
- 9781474453820
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647330.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The conclusion briefly reflects on the myopia that the Russian Revolution itself generated, and suggests that in British literature it was Aldous Huxley, just a few years after the period considered ...
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The conclusion briefly reflects on the myopia that the Russian Revolution itself generated, and suggests that in British literature it was Aldous Huxley, just a few years after the period considered in this study, who was the first to take a distance from events and from the particularities of the Revolution and the League to ask what a future, world state might look like.Less
The conclusion briefly reflects on the myopia that the Russian Revolution itself generated, and suggests that in British literature it was Aldous Huxley, just a few years after the period considered in this study, who was the first to take a distance from events and from the particularities of the Revolution and the League to ask what a future, world state might look like.
Peter Edgerly Firchow
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816683611
- eISBN:
- 9781452949291
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816683611.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s collaboration with Aldous Huxley on a number of literary projects in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. It considers how the Huxley–Isherwood ...
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This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s collaboration with Aldous Huxley on a number of literary projects in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. It considers how the Huxley–Isherwood friendship allowed the two writers to explore their common interests in Eastern religion, film writing, and the Southern California landscape. Working on scripts for plays and films was something Isherwood was good at and already had a fair amount of experience doing, not only for a lot less money a few years earlier with Berthold Viertel in London, but even more notably with his close friend W. H. Auden. He undertook several collaborated scripts with Huxley, including Jacob’s Hands—the only one ever to be published. Unfortunately, their collaborations did not lead to financial or artistic success.Less
This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s collaboration with Aldous Huxley on a number of literary projects in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. It considers how the Huxley–Isherwood friendship allowed the two writers to explore their common interests in Eastern religion, film writing, and the Southern California landscape. Working on scripts for plays and films was something Isherwood was good at and already had a fair amount of experience doing, not only for a lot less money a few years earlier with Berthold Viertel in London, but even more notably with his close friend W. H. Auden. He undertook several collaborated scripts with Huxley, including Jacob’s Hands—the only one ever to be published. Unfortunately, their collaborations did not lead to financial or artistic success.
Stephen Siff
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252039195
- eISBN:
- 9780252097232
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252039195.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter studies the dramatic appearance of LSD on the news agenda in reports on scientific studies using drugs to simulate madness, and the concurrent discussion of mystical, mind-expanding drug ...
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This chapter studies the dramatic appearance of LSD on the news agenda in reports on scientific studies using drugs to simulate madness, and the concurrent discussion of mystical, mind-expanding drug use sparked by the publication of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. In addressing these topics, journalists introduced American audiences to new drugs and to the use of drugs to create mental states considered to have significant scholarly and academic importance. Scholarly interest gave journalists license to describe drug states that previously had been considered inappropriate for public view. Reports in mainstream media outlets were followed quickly by even more sensational coverage in more marginal publications.Less
This chapter studies the dramatic appearance of LSD on the news agenda in reports on scientific studies using drugs to simulate madness, and the concurrent discussion of mystical, mind-expanding drug use sparked by the publication of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. In addressing these topics, journalists introduced American audiences to new drugs and to the use of drugs to create mental states considered to have significant scholarly and academic importance. Scholarly interest gave journalists license to describe drug states that previously had been considered inappropriate for public view. Reports in mainstream media outlets were followed quickly by even more sensational coverage in more marginal publications.
Valentine Cunningham
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198229742
- eISBN:
- 9780191678912
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198229742.003.0015
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter examines the literary culture of the university during the period from 1914 to 1970. Twentieth-century Oxford contained an extraordinary matrix of extraordinary literary talent. It ...
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This chapter examines the literary culture of the university during the period from 1914 to 1970. Twentieth-century Oxford contained an extraordinary matrix of extraordinary literary talent. It educated some of the most notable personalities in English literature including T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, T. E. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, and J. R. R. Tolkien. This flourishing of literary talent could be attributed to the university's strategy of incorporating creative writing to its literary courses and its ability to attract talented teachers and students from home and abroad.Less
This chapter examines the literary culture of the university during the period from 1914 to 1970. Twentieth-century Oxford contained an extraordinary matrix of extraordinary literary talent. It educated some of the most notable personalities in English literature including T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, T. E. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, and J. R. R. Tolkien. This flourishing of literary talent could be attributed to the university's strategy of incorporating creative writing to its literary courses and its ability to attract talented teachers and students from home and abroad.
John Gould
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199253746
- eISBN:
- 9780191719745
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253746.003.0017
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
In 1925, Aldous Huxley in his book Along the Road wrote an essay in the course of which he asserted that the ‘best picture’ in the world was Piero della Francesca's ‘Resurrection’, a mural which was ...
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In 1925, Aldous Huxley in his book Along the Road wrote an essay in the course of which he asserted that the ‘best picture’ in the world was Piero della Francesca's ‘Resurrection’, a mural which was in Piero's birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro, and is still there. In 1944, as the Allies advanced northwards and the Germans retreated before them, the ‘Resurrection’ came perilously close to not surviving, within minutes indeed of destruction by British artillery. That it did survive is due to the fact that the commanding officer of the battery which had been ordered to shell the German troops still holding on to Borgo San Sepolcro had read Aldous Huxley's essay and remembered it as the order to open fire came through to him: the ‘best picture’ in the world was to be his target. He hesitated and did not give the order to open fire in the hope that the German troops might at the last moment resume their retreat and evacuate the town. This chapter considers what we are to make of the painting's survival.Less
In 1925, Aldous Huxley in his book Along the Road wrote an essay in the course of which he asserted that the ‘best picture’ in the world was Piero della Francesca's ‘Resurrection’, a mural which was in Piero's birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro, and is still there. In 1944, as the Allies advanced northwards and the Germans retreated before them, the ‘Resurrection’ came perilously close to not surviving, within minutes indeed of destruction by British artillery. That it did survive is due to the fact that the commanding officer of the battery which had been ordered to shell the German troops still holding on to Borgo San Sepolcro had read Aldous Huxley's essay and remembered it as the order to open fire came through to him: the ‘best picture’ in the world was to be his target. He hesitated and did not give the order to open fire in the hope that the German troops might at the last moment resume their retreat and evacuate the town. This chapter considers what we are to make of the painting's survival.
Nergis Ertürk
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199746682
- eISBN:
- 9780199918775
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746682.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter Four examines another exemplary novel, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (“Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair,” 1949), by the journalist, novelist, and critic Peyami Safa. In a narrative and ...
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Chapter Four examines another exemplary novel, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (“Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair,” 1949), by the journalist, novelist, and critic Peyami Safa. In a narrative and discursive idiom animated by regional colloquialisms, French medical and psychoanalytic terminology, archaic Ottoman Turkish, Arabic prayer words, and Kurdish borrowings, Safa’s novel provides yet another account of the failure of the nationalist phonocentric project to meet its ideal goal. Unlike The Time Regulation Institute, however, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (which is organized by scenes of the translation and rewriting of such texts as Rimbaud’s “L’Éternité” and Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy), can be said to aspire to the transcendence of linguistic difference and the reconstitution of a new order of signification in the nationalization and Islamicization of ethnic and religious difference. My reading of Safa’s novel emphasizes the collapse of this assimilating authorial agenda, but affirms it, at the same time, as a mark of the ineradicable internal heterogeneity of the Turkish language.Less
Chapter Four examines another exemplary novel, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (“Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair,” 1949), by the journalist, novelist, and critic Peyami Safa. In a narrative and discursive idiom animated by regional colloquialisms, French medical and psychoanalytic terminology, archaic Ottoman Turkish, Arabic prayer words, and Kurdish borrowings, Safa’s novel provides yet another account of the failure of the nationalist phonocentric project to meet its ideal goal. Unlike The Time Regulation Institute, however, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (which is organized by scenes of the translation and rewriting of such texts as Rimbaud’s “L’Éternité” and Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy), can be said to aspire to the transcendence of linguistic difference and the reconstitution of a new order of signification in the nationalization and Islamicization of ethnic and religious difference. My reading of Safa’s novel emphasizes the collapse of this assimilating authorial agenda, but affirms it, at the same time, as a mark of the ineradicable internal heterogeneity of the Turkish language.
Robert L. Caserio
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816683611
- eISBN:
- 9781452949291
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816683611.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the role played by the novel in Christopher Isherwood’s attitudes toward mysticism as well as his writing’s relation to Aldous Huxley. To this end, it considers the place of ...
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This chapter examines the role played by the novel in Christopher Isherwood’s attitudes toward mysticism as well as his writing’s relation to Aldous Huxley. To this end, it considers the place of religion in Anglo-American modernism, with particular emphasis on G. R. S. Mead’s modernist journal The Quest, one of the transnational conduits whereby Eastern religions, including Vedanta, entered the background that nurtured Isherwood. Isherwood’s statements about his fiction’s relation to religion are not the whole story of the ties that his novels—and the novelistic genre itself—might have to mystical experience. This chapter also looks at Huxley’s hostility to the novel form and Isherwood’s 1980 book My Guru and His Disciple. Finally, it discusses the novelistic form’s relation to contemplation and to timelessness by offering a reading of Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit.Less
This chapter examines the role played by the novel in Christopher Isherwood’s attitudes toward mysticism as well as his writing’s relation to Aldous Huxley. To this end, it considers the place of religion in Anglo-American modernism, with particular emphasis on G. R. S. Mead’s modernist journal The Quest, one of the transnational conduits whereby Eastern religions, including Vedanta, entered the background that nurtured Isherwood. Isherwood’s statements about his fiction’s relation to religion are not the whole story of the ties that his novels—and the novelistic genre itself—might have to mystical experience. This chapter also looks at Huxley’s hostility to the novel form and Isherwood’s 1980 book My Guru and His Disciple. Finally, it discusses the novelistic form’s relation to contemplation and to timelessness by offering a reading of Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit.
David Goodway
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310256
- eISBN:
- 9781846312557
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846312557
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. This book seeks to recover and ...
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From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. This book seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition. It succeeds as simultaneously a cultural history of left-libertarian thought in Britain and a demonstration of the applicability of that history to current politics. The author argues that a recovered anarchist tradition could — and should — be a touchstone for contemporary political radicals. Moving from Aldous Huxley and John Cowper Powys to the war in Iraq, this volume will energize leftist movements throughout Britain and the rest of the world.Less
From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. This book seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition. It succeeds as simultaneously a cultural history of left-libertarian thought in Britain and a demonstration of the applicability of that history to current politics. The author argues that a recovered anarchist tradition could — and should — be a touchstone for contemporary political radicals. Moving from Aldous Huxley and John Cowper Powys to the war in Iraq, this volume will energize leftist movements throughout Britain and the rest of the world.
Laura Frost
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231152723
- eISBN:
- 9780231526463
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231152723.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Aldous Huxley decried “the horrors of modern pleasure,” or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, ...
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Aldous Huxley decried “the horrors of modern pleasure,” or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. This book follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss. It draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. It considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire. Throughout, the text incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, the book calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.Less
Aldous Huxley decried “the horrors of modern pleasure,” or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. This book follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss. It draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. It considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire. Throughout, the text incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, the book calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.
Christopher Ricks
- Published in print:
- 1984
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128298
- eISBN:
- 9780191671654
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128298.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
The lines from the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are parodied but respected in Aldous Huxley's ‘Frascati's’, a poem which deliberately has some of the stage-properties but not the properties of a John Keats ...
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The lines from the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are parodied but respected in Aldous Huxley's ‘Frascati's’, a poem which deliberately has some of the stage-properties but not the properties of a John Keats poem. It is felt that the poet's distaste is distasteful, though there is an awareness that some could feel the author's distaste for it as well. But what concentrates the poem and the argument is the concluding sweating. The indulgence of any appetite tends to raise the threshold for stimuli irrelevant to the satisfaction of the appetite involved. The more powerful the appetite, the greater the potential danger there is, and hence the greater the need for isolation.Less
The lines from the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are parodied but respected in Aldous Huxley's ‘Frascati's’, a poem which deliberately has some of the stage-properties but not the properties of a John Keats poem. It is felt that the poet's distaste is distasteful, though there is an awareness that some could feel the author's distaste for it as well. But what concentrates the poem and the argument is the concluding sweating. The indulgence of any appetite tends to raise the threshold for stimuli irrelevant to the satisfaction of the appetite involved. The more powerful the appetite, the greater the potential danger there is, and hence the greater the need for isolation.
