Brave New Worlds: Brian O’Nolan and Aldous Huxley

Brave New Worlds: Brian O’Nolan and Aldous Huxley

“Our leisures are now as highly mechanised as our labours... the sphere of play no less than in that of work” (Aldous Huxley, ‘The Victory of Art Over Humanity’, 1931)

Through novels like Brave New World and The Third Policeman, Aldous Huxley and Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien) translated the terrors of the 20th century into worlds that are eerie portents of our own: the distinction between the human and the mechanical fading; capitalist production re-imagined as an irreverent embrace of the pleasure principle. And in 21st century conflict, the remote-controlled mass violence they both decried is as present as ever.

This much is clear. It is less well understood that the intertextual social satire of Huxley’s early novels, banned in Ireland, exerted a formative influence on O’Nolan’s own outrageous style of metafictional play. Or that O’Nolan, in his subversive way, occupied a similar position to Huxley as a public intellectual and educator through his widely-read journalism.

A collaboration between Robin Hull’s Aldous Huxley Centre in Zürich and Oisín Ó’Nualláin, Brian O’Nolan’s nephew, this event brings together key thinkers in Huxley studies and modernist research. In their talks, a comparative study of the connections between Huxley and O’Nolan will create the space to address urgent questions surrounding the medicinal, environmental, technological and apocalyptic through the work of Huxley and O’Nolan.

Keynote and featured speakers include Maebh Long, Paul Fagan, David Dunaway, Dana Sawyer, Jake Poller and Brian Ó Conchubhair. Panellist papers will explore intoxication, food, time, censorship and the highly addictive read / write paradigm of the information age.

The workshop will benefit students and scholars of twentieth and twenty-first literature, as well as those focused on topics involving medicine, media theory and environmentalism and members of the public who wish to delve further into either of these two important writers.

Keynote speakers

Dr. Maebh Long (Eamon Clery Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Otago)
Editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien and author of Assembling Flann O’Brien

Professor Dana Sawyer (Maine College of Art & Design)
Author of Aldous Huxley: A Biography and editor of Aldous Huxley and Self-Realization

Featured speakers

Dr. Paul Fagan (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
General Editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies and Co-Founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society

Professor David K. Dunaway (University of New Mexico)
Author of Huxley in Hollywood and Aldous Huxley Recollected

Dr. Jake Poller (Queen Mary University of London)
Author of Aldous Huxley. Editor of Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century

Dr. Tobias W. Harris (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Author of Dublin’s Dadaist: Flann O’Brien and the European Avant-Garde, 1934-45

Host or Publisher Aldous Huxley Centre Zurich