Brave New World essay prompts:
I. “It is as sparkling, as provocative, as brilliant, in the appropriate sense, as impressive as the day it was published. This is in part because its prophetic voice has remained surprisingly contemporary, both in its particular forecasts and in its general tone of semi-serious alarm. But it is much more because the book succeeds as a work of art...” –Martin Green
-Write an essay in which you defend this statement about Brave New World.
II. Analyze the following paragraph from pg. 69. Write an essay that explains this excerpt in the context of all that we discussed in class.
“A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.”
Many will be lured by the first prompt, but it is actually the more the difficult of the two - not that you should be dissuaded; but you will need to be very, very specific about the language of the prompt and answering it wholly, especially about its qualifications as a work of art (we talked about this a bit in class).
Also, class discussions are artillery for these essays. I've seen few students taking notes during them, but my expectation is that the ground we covered in class will find its way into your argument.
Lastly, BE SPECIFIC, BE ARGUABLE, CLOSE-READ EVIDENCE!
