2026/05/24 by Tobias Harris · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Joseph Conrad and Literature #Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis #Modernist Literature and Criticism
paper · doi:10.16995/pr.27363
openalex publication_date 2026/05/24 · openalex created_date 2026/05/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/28
This article explores the stylistic intersections between the journalism of Aldous Huxley and Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien), arguing that both writers use strategic ambivalences of tone to subvert journalistic convention. Using the theoretical lens of the Platonic pharmakon—as explored by Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler—the essay demonstrates how Huxley and O’Nolan saw print culture as pharmacological: a remedy and a poison which thus requires critical challenges in its adoption to counteract its automatising effects. The essay applies Brecht’s concept of ‘functional transformation’ to examples of where Huxley and O’Nolan, fearful of the tendencies of print culture to foreclose the possibilities for thought, use stylistics to re-engineer the media apparatus with the aim of restoring the reader’s faculty for critical judgment.