My final project will be to look at Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited and their relationship to technology.
Brave New World is a narrative about the power of control that technology can have upon people in a fictional world. When in our world Huxley is attempting to use his book as a technology to inform people of the dangers that he believes the government and the powerful upper class can impose upon us using technologies similar to the ones he describes in his fictional work.
In class Adam mentioned that I should take a look at Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We because it is considered the book from which Brave New World and similar works have arisen. Upon my first inspection of We I notice a lot of discussion of the removal and lose of identity. As well as a society where the people are forced to conform to a society that is almost completely choreographed. I don’t believe that We has the discussions of technology that Brave New World possesses. It also lacks a supplement to itself, Brave New World Revisited, that takes technology in our society and relates it to the means of control used in the fictional society of Brave New World.
1 comment:
This is a good proposal. You give a good explanation for why you don't want anything to do with We - sounds good. I take your thesis to be this line: "When in our world Huxley is attempting to use his book as a technology to inform people of the dangers that he believes the government and the powerful upper class can impose upon us using technologies similar to the ones he describes in his fictional work."
This is very interesting, relates to HOL indirectly (if you choose to go there, which you probably don't), and relates to lots of arguments which have been made, by figures from Marshall McLuhan to Theodor Adorno to Abbey Hoffmann, etc., about the power of the mass media - a power which lies, some might say, within the technological medium itself.
Sounds good.
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