Brave New World and Its Afterlife

This course is an intensive study of Aldous Huxley’s influential novel, Brave New World (1932). It aims to introduce students both to the context of Huxley’s world and the extensive reflections it spawned on the reimagining of what Anthony Burgess called “the perfectibility of man” conducted as a “scientific programme.” If Brave New World has entered the lexicon as a moniker for totalitarian overreach and mind conditioning, the novel merits closer examination for the unique means by which it achieves its effects, ranging from radical social engineering to the management of desire. Among the many questions the course addresses are the following: What are readers to make of the inversion of norms that identifies the World State with the acme of modernity and the “savage reservation” with a discredited past that includes concepts like the family? Does this inversion obscure the standpoints from which a critique of the World State can be made? How does Huxley unsettle the terms of analysis of the novel’s politics? 

These questions, among others, are posed as learning tools for approaching the novel, the context in which it was written, and the broader influences it exerted. The syllabus assigns several weeks of reading Brave New World alongside relevant secondary criticism, with a view to encouraging students to probe different critical perspectives and identify evolving paradigms that amplify the novel’s cross-disciplinary engagements. Examples of the questions that students are encouraged to address are: Can the World State’s project of control through pleasure effectively eliminate feeling while requiring sensation? Is the technocratic manipulation of time (through the organization of workers’ bodies and labor) undone by a necessary recourse to the eternity-promising drug soma? How is Brave New World both a futuristic view of a dominant world order, which is carefully produced by social engineering and conditioning, and a depiction of a subversive counterculture, uprooting the norms transmitted across generations?  

The syllabus includes adjacent works, such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), viewed as a direct predecessor to Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Students will read Nineteen Eighty-Four to determine whether its