Brave New World Class Curriculum Analysis

Analyzing literature is one of the most important steps to understanding the author’s purpose for writing a novel. When students analyze literature or write an analytical essay, they often mistake it as summarizing the plot of the book. However, analyzing literature is more in depth than just summarizing because many key aspects go into finding the hidden messages of a book. When students summarize the plot of a book, they are often missing many literary devices, such as metaphors, foreshadowing, and imagery.

During the 1930s, the times of World War II and the Great Depression, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World. There were several issues going on in Huxley’s time that are still present in today's world . Huxley features some of these problems in his book, Brave New World. These problems include drug or medicine usage, women and gender inequality, and traditional marriage/homosexuality. Since this book was written during the times of the Great Depression and World War II, these factors also contributed to some of these issues. Since World War II and the Great Depression are over, these do not affect the problems today. Although some of these problems are still a problem in today's world and society, they are not as much of a problem as they were during Huxley's time.

Thomas C. Foster in ‘How to Read Literature like a Professor’, references the different literary devices that authors use in literature, in order to enhance the reader’s ability to critically analyze literature from any time period. Foster expands the reader’s understanding of literature by exploring the profound impact of symbols and common themes on literature.

In Brave New World Aldous Huxley, creates a dystopian society which is scientifically advance in order to make life orderly, easy, and free of trouble. This society is controlled by a World State who is not question. In this world life is manufactured and everyone is created with a purpose, never having the choice of free will. Huxley use of irony and tone bewilders readers by creating a world with puritanical social norms, which lacks love, privacy and were a false sense of happiness is instituted, making life meaningless and controlled.

Aldous Huxley has a humanistic, deep and enlightened view of how society should be, and of what constitutes true happiness. In his novel, Brave New World, he shows his ideas in a very obscure manner. Huxley presents his ideas in a satirical fashion. This sarcastic style of writing helped Huxley show his views in a very captivating and insightful manner. The entire novel describes a dystopia in which intimate relationships, the ability to choose one's destiny, and the importance of family are strictly opposed. In Huxley's mind, however, these three principles are highly regarded as necessary for a meaningful and fulfilling existence.

From reproductive rights, morality, and drugs, Huxley develops a futuristic approach to mankind. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley serves as a cautionary tale about contemporary American culture by illustrating the technological and scientific advancements within a society to establish power and the affects it may have on mankind.

Huxley’s Brave New World centers around a society far from modern day. In this warped

The Brave New World that Huxley created in his book is one of dramatically stratified social classes, Alpha through Epsilon, designed and conditioned from even before birth to fit into their predestined role in the society. Especially for the upper classes, everything is engineered towards comfort and consumption, to the point where people can even escape uncomfortable emotions by taking a drug known as

Having been a somewhat of an outsider in his life, physically and mentally, Aldous Huxley used what others thought as his oddities to create complex works. His large stature and creative individuality is expressed in the characters of his novel, Brave New World. In crafting such characters as Lenina, John, Linda, Bernard, and Helmholtz, not to mention the entire world he created in the text itself, Huxley incorporated some of his humanities into those of his characters. Contrastly, he removed the same humanities from the society as a whole to seem perfect. This, the essence and value of being human, is the great meaning of Brave New World. The presence and lack of human nature in the novel exemplifies the words of literary theorist Edward Said: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Huxley’s characters reflect the “rift” in their jarred reaction to new environments and lifestyles, as well as the remnant of individuality various characters maintain in a brave new world.

Appealing towards social familiarity can function as one’s anchor for their literary audience to hold on and connect with; however in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, his presentation of society in future serves to challenge our very expectations on the extent of depths of immorality mankind can subject itself to. The horrific justifications of manipulative practices such as infant conditioning and sleep-learning indicates both Huxley’s skepticism towards motives behind radical social experiments and the underlying danger of his audience being indifferent towards the weaponization of such experiments. (AUDIENCE) Furthermore, Huxley’s development of the World State caste system and its effects of alienation towards characters such as Helmholtz and Bernard in BNW act as indirect criticism towards the recent emergence of superpowers with social frameworks determined to undermine human individualism.(CONTEXT) Both motifs also contribute to a sense of all-around absurdity in BNW’s society and its focus around the complete rejection of past conservatism, allowing Huxley’s to express his personal opposition towards the anti-traditionalist movements dominating contemporary thought at the time. (AUTHOR) The manifestation of these

Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor begins with an introduction that provides a framework for the next five chapters. The author explains that any story can fit into a general, archetypical theme, and he spends the first five chapters of his book speaking on these critically prevalent themes.

Looking back on the life of Aldous Huxley, he portrayed many of his problems in Brave New World. Huxley wrote a work that not only made the reader look upon Huxley’s time, but also make them look at their own and make a connection to see if the reader had similar problems still occurring. Literary devices such as characterization and allusions were used by Huxley to give the reader an idea of what was occurring in Huxley’s lifetime. Throughout Brave New World Huxley expressed three main problems: religion, the role of women in society, and the idolization of a “public/business” figure.

In this world, the family unit does not exist and the concept of having a mother and father is considered a primitive quality of humans. Technology has subverted the world so much that even God is replaced by Ford. Constant references throughout the novel are made to "Our Ford," referring to Henry Ford, the embodiment of industrial development. The real world in which we live is not much different from this that Huxley writes about in the 1930's. Technological developments have already allowed us to create embryos outside of the womb. The values that once existed in religion and family are slowly but surely disappearing. Even today\, the vast majority of America and the world have lessened their beliefs, their worshiping of God and practicing religion. Technology has become the new religion as it provides the materialistic progress that people desire. Women will soon have the ability to have children but not carry the children themselves for nine months. What is important anymore? Because of technology, a family unit merely represents a group of people that has dinner together every so often. Values in education and good citizenship are no longer taught to children in such intensity as distractions brought forth by the media and video games only encourage having fun as opposed to studying and working hard for a future. We are destroying our own world with the obsessive violence taught and practiced by elementary

In many cases when you read a novel you may find comparisons between the "fictional" society and your realistic one. The author may consciously or unconsciously create similarities between these two worlds. The novelist can foresee the future and write according to this vision. In Brave New World, Adlous Huxley envisions the future of our society and the dangerous direction it is headed in.

Dystopian novels have become more common over the last century; each ranging from one extreme society to the next. A dystopia, “A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control,”[1] through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, criticizes about current trends, societal norms, or political systems. The society in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is divided in a caste system, in which humans are not individuals, do not have the opportunity to be individuals, and never experience true happiness. These characteristics of the reading point towards a well-structured