The Inhuman World Under The Cultural Totalitarianism

The famous British novelist Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World was published in 1932. In its 1946 edition, Huxley added a foreword to the novel, but he didn't modify the content of the novel. Today Brave New World has undoubtedly become one of the classic novels in western literary history and is widely studied by experts and scholars of different fields. Using the related theories of cultural studies, this thesis aims to give a cultural interpretation to the novel.This thesis is made up of five parts. The first part is the introduction which interprets the ideas of utopia and dystopia and gives a general introduction to Aldous Huxley and the plot of Brave New World. Also in this part, the current critical reviews on the novel at home and abroad and the thesis's theoretical foundation are introduced.Chapter One explores the most important field of the cultural studies, power. The power analysis to Brave New World is along the line of class, race and gender. What's more, using Italian communist Antonio Gramsci's theory, the ideas of cultural hegemony and ideology are also studied in this part.Chapter Two analyzes the identities of the main characters in the novel and the cultural conflicts existed in that new world. Most of the main characters have experienced identities crises to some extent. The cultural conflicts embodied in the novel mainly result from the confrontation of the dominant culture and the dominated cultures.In Chapter Three, the culture industry and consumer society in Brave New World are studied according to the culture industry theory of the German Frankfurt School and the famous French sociologist Jean Baudrillard's theory of the consumer society. The new world develops culture industry and encourages consumption in order to effectively control its citizens and safeguard its cultural totalitarianism.In the conclusion, the cultural totalitarianism of the new world is reviewed and the argument of understanding and respecting the heterogeneous cultures and developing multi-culture is advanced.