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Aldous Leonard Huxley

 

Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894-1963), English novelist and critic gifted with an acute and far-ranging intelligence and considered to be one of the creators of the “intellectual novel”. His works were notable for their elegance, wit, and pessimistic satire. He is best known for his novels and essays, short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, norms and ideals. Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank.

Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the prominent biologist and the third child of the biographer and writer. He was educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford. He worked on various periodicals and published four books of verse before the appearance of his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921). The novels Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), both of which illustrate the nihilistic temper of the 1920s, and Brave New World (1932), an ironic vision of a future utopia, established Huxley's fame.

Brave New World is the most famous novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1932. Set in London in 2540, the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering, and sleep-learning that combine to change society.

The world the novel describes is a utopia, though an ironic one: humanity is carefree, healthy and technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eliminated and everyone is permanently happy due to government-provided stimulation. The irony is that all of these things have been achieved by eliminating many things that humans consider to be central to their identity — family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. It is also a hedonistic society, deriving pleasure from promiscuous sex and drug use, especially the use of soma, a powerful drug taken to escape pain and bad memories through hallucinatory fantasies.

Brave New World was inspired by the H.G. Wells utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells’ optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave New World. Contrary to the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia". He was able to use the setting and characters from his futuristic fantasy to express widely held opinions, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future.

Brave New World Revisited, written by Huxley almost thirty years after Brave New World, was a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved towards or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future but in Brave New World Revisited he concluded that the world was becoming much more like Brave New World much faster than he thought. Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation as well as all the means by which populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal suggestion (подсознательное внушение).

During the 1920s he lived largely in Italy and France. He immigrated to the United States in 1937.

The novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) continues to emphasize the emptiness and aimlessness experienced in contemporary society, but it also shows Huxley's growing interest in Hindu philosophy and mysticism as a viable alternative. Many of his subsequent works reflect this concern, notably The Perennial Philosophy (1946).

1.5 Thomas Stearns Eliot

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965), American-born English poet, literary critic, dramatist, a leader of the modernist movement in poetry and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, who is best known for his poem The Waste Land (1922), one of the most widely discussed literary works of the early 20th century. Eliot’s plays, which rely on a colloquial use of unrhymed verse, attempted to revive poetic drama for the contemporary audience. His methods of literary analysis have been a major influence on English and American critical writing.

With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption (искупление). The poem's style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work's many quotations and allusions. Eliot expresses the hopelessness and confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay of urbs aeterna (the “eternal city”). This is the ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem's constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles. But The Waste Land is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is rather a timeless, simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil. The poem's original manuscript of about 800 lines was cut down to 433 at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. The Waste Land is not Eliot 's greatest poem, though it is his most famous.

 

 

2. The 20th –century drama: George Bernard Shaw

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), Irish-born writer, considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most keen pamphleteer since the Irish-born satirist Jonathan Swift and the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. He was also one of literature’s great letter writers.

A dreamer and mystic inwardly shy and quietly generous, Shaw was at the same time the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and disrespectful of institutions. Even his most serious works for the stage have a comic texture; his plays are full of epigrams and lively dialogue.

Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin. Leading by no means an easy life, by the mid-1880s Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became a firm (and lifelong) believer in vegetarianism, a wonderful `orator, and a playwright. He was the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society.

Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses (produced 1892), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a mocking of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theater. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). These first seven works for the stage (the others were Candida, The Philanderer, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and You Never Can Tell) received brief runs at best or no productions at all. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was banned by the censor as obscene. One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion), published in 1901, achieved a slightly better success. Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions. It established Shaw’s popular reputation in London as playwright and wise man.

Shaw’s comic masterpiece and a comedy of manners, Pygmalion (1914; many years later popular also as a film and as the basis for the musical comedy My Fair Lady), was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploitation of one human being by another.

Shaw’s next major play, Heartbreak House (1919), exposing the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation, was pessimistic. The intellectual watershed of World War I (1914-1918) caused the difference.

For Saint Joan (1923), Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature. In Shaw’s hands Joan of Arc became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius.

Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays, beginning with The Apple Cart (1929), turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes he had handled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance that owed more to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes than to Ibsen. Shaw died in his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence on November 2, 1950.

Although he founded no "school" of playwrights like himself, by forging a drama combining moral passion and intellectual conflict, reviving the older comedy of manners, and experimenting with symbolic farce, Shaw helped to reshape the stage of his time. His bold, critical intelligence and sharp pen, touching on contemporary issues, helped form the thought of his own and later generations.

 


LECTURE 9

 

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