Contexts

Good afternoon. Today I will be exploring how context impacts the value within text.

Brave New World a satirical novel by Aldous Huxley and Blade Runner, a post modern film by Ridley Scott are two dystopian speculative fiction texts which address both the tension between humanity and the natural world through as the tape states the 'taming of nature' and the true notion of progress. Both texts have been strongly influenced by the historical, cultural and social contexts of the composer therefore affecting the values explored within each of the texts.

Brave New World was first published in 1932. It was as stated in the tape recording a cautionary tale of Huxley observations of the American society in the early 20th century, and is seen as Heather Stuart suggests as a prophetic novel in that it anticipates our society today.When Huxley started writing the novel there were tremendous political, economic and philosophical changes taking place in both Europe and America. Brave New World depicts a society where humanity is carefree and technologically advanced. Both welfare and poverty have been eliminated and everyone is potentially happy. et there is irony due to the fact that the things that have been taken away in order to achieve this are the things that we value so highly today such as family, art, cultural diversity and religion.

Although this novel is set in the future, it is based upon many contemporary issues of the early 20th century. He was writing at a time when rapid industrialisation, consumerism, mass production and technological advancements had become the driving force behind social organisation. Huxley's fear was that man had built higher than he could climb, unleashing a power he would be unable to control, a world where technology became the master and not the servant. Huxley has represented this by applying mass production and technology to humanity through the Bokonovsky process which is described as being a "prodigious improvements on nature".

The reader learns of the states ability to produce "96 human beings where only one grew before" - Applying mass production to humanity, where individuals became productions of the state, deprived as Stuart suggests of "the ability to live independent from the social body of the state" - forcing us to then question - What is the true value of individuality? Via the Bokonovsky process the predestination or the destiny of the individual was put into the hands of the state whereby individuals were genetically modified to be given only what the state would need of them.

Huxley has used negative death imagery, scientific jargon and a detached writing style in the first chapter to describe this creation process - dehumanising humanity and thus representing his fears of the not so distant future.Huxley's novel depicts a dystopian world in which a totalitarian government controls society by the use of science and technology. A society in which individuals are 'conditioned' to act, think, feel, believe, and respond, in the way the government wants them to. This clearly shows the complete control of the government over the individual from the time of conception. The consequences of the idea of state control are a loss of dignity, morals, values, and emotions - In short as Huxley suggests, a loss of humanity.

Writing in an era where nature was considered resilient, the 'wild' was seen as dangerous and exotic and was generally placed in binary opposition against the civilised. The civilised were expected to dominate or have control over nature.

Huxley's fear of societies relationship with nature it is clearly represented in Brave New World due to the marginalised amount of nature within the society and the fact that nature is potentially mocked through the Bokonovsky process - where man plays god.Huxley was able to use the setting and characters to express widely held opinions, particularly the fear of losing identity in the fast paced future of the world.

Huxley's book whilst satirizing the development of society also provides a suicidal outlook on the future.

Blade Runner by Ridley Scott is an influential 1982 speculative fiction film. The film depicts a, as stated in the tape 'post industrial urban wasteland' showing that in attempting to advance society humanity had lost its way. Based