Culture and Anarchy George Orwell PDF

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George Orwell '1984' Dystopia: 'A modern term invented as the opposite of utopia, and applied to any alarmigly unpleasant imaginary world, usually of the projected future. The term is also applied to fictional works depicting such worlds. A significant form of science fiction and of modern satire.' Chris Baldick The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Other dystopia examples The Handmaid's Tale , The Matrix, A Clockwork Orange Why still so influential? Have to think about the relationship to the contemporary society. Ideas in 1984 seem quite dramatic but there are reflections in our society and is historically anchored in its own period. Historical Contexts: Still open to critique and analysis. Was taken to be very pro-socialist and working class, but at the time people also saw it supporting things like dictatorships and nationalism. Culturally very important but it's still a text, not particularly experimental or ambitious in its form. Very linear, focus chiefly on Winston. As opposed to Mrs Dalloway which flits between psyches. Argues that it is a bit of a realist novel, the way it presents Winston and particularly details the environment, very particular detail of London. Elements of an espionage spy thriller which was popular at the time with the war etc. Idea of where are we in the world, time is used to mess with Winston. Ideas of secularism, post enlightenment. Limits of language, failure to fully communicate meaning. All these different genres and elements that make it such a popular text. But what does it say about nation and identity? George Orwell: Biography helps gives a sense of locating the time we're talking about and what was going on in the world. Born Eric Blair, 1903, India (father in Indian Civil Service) Moved to England in 1904 Went to boarding school, eventually Eton - middle class, shows George Orwell is growing up in a different social class to what his concerns might lead you to think. Adopts pen name Started writing non-fiction books about Colonisation in Burma and homelessness and vagrancy in London and Paris Involved in the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia (1938) sees the rise of fascism and who belongs to a country and who doesn’t. Serious injury and never really recovers from it. Living on borrowed time. Signed up to the BBC as a journalist but resigned in 1943 when he grew tired of 'pushing propaganda'. Very anti-fascist but hated the idea of pushing a particular political agenda particularly around WWII and how news was manipulated. Balance to Orwell, idea about justice but not at the expense of truth. Animal Farm (1945) Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949) His life covers a lot of changes in class systems and in society. Britain after WWII WWI: 1914-1918 WWII:1939-1945 Austerity Economy Rationing until 1954

Loans from US and Canada (only recently paid off this debt) 'Cradle to grave' welfare-state reforms Housing shortage 1948: introduction of the NHS End of Empire Migration from colonies coincides with the windrush Gender trouble due to the women taking over a lot of jobs when the men went to war and as they came back they were pushed back into the house. Before the war women didn’t get a degree but after women are more inclined to get into education. Baby boom The world after WWII The splitting-up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. […] [T]he balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin Modern Classics If we didn’t realise it was from a book, it could have been taken from a textbook, larger social commentary of whats going on in the world. 'Eastasia' reflecting what was happening with Japan and China in the second world war. World in 1984 was similar to the world in 1948. Not reading for Orwell's opinion, [P]articular ways of reading Orwell are tied to particular ways of ‘reading’ the world. All manner of people have raided his work for all kinds of meanings – meanings religious, reactionary, radical. Orwell is, transparently, many things to many men. He is appropriated with equal facility by the New Left, which is drawn to his prickly, stubborn radicalism; and by the ideologues of the Institute of Directors, who see the dread shadow of ‘totalitarianism’ in the merest gestures of social regulation. [F]inally it is ‘Orwell’ that is the text, and Orwell is only one of its authors. Alok Rai, Orwell and the Politics of Despair: A Critical Study of the Writings of Orwell (1988) George Key figures in 1984: Big Brother, reflects Stalin in Orwell's description from the novel.

depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Critique of what was going on in Russian society, Stalin 'Man of Steel' supreme ruler of the soviet union. Rose to power in the Russian revolution. Increasingly turned into a totalitarian state and began to form its own empire, reason Russia is such a massive country. 'The Americans' and 'The Death of Stalin' satire about what Stalin was like. Caused the death and suffering of 10s of millions of people. Goldstein, reflects Trotsky Architects of socialist Russia, wrote 'the revolution betrayed' flaws of making Russia a place of equality with less suffering for the people. Trotsky was like a founding father of socialist Russia but was also a figure of ridicule.

Nationalism: [The nation] is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because even the members of the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear from them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991) Talks about how nationalism works as a concept, sense of belonging to a nation. Nationalism is a way of organising people. Abstract term (Clip of the 2 minute hate) Trying to share culture and bring people together though they may not have anything in common. Ideas about how community is fostered even in such a hateful society. Not everyone is part of the community that you see in the 2 minutes hate. The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan – everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four Shows that Winston is aware of the outside world, the world he's in isn't going to exist forever. Weird instance of Doublethink in the extract, holding two contrasting opinions at once. Proles are focus of extract but also thinking about them by comparing them to the rest of the world. Biopic novel that was focused on one character seems to open out. Proles portrayed in problematic ways, seen as the saviour figure. Very dark frightening world but in the extract there is a utopia on the horizon.

Language, Power and Control

No other adaption can really portray in the same way as the text. Language is power, what knowledge these novels contain. Language is the clue to the downfall of the dystopian society.

[I]n the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 205.

But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 211.    

Things done by the party to manipulate language for control. 1940s and 50s the concern was about being passive consumers and taking in information. Still very much a historical text but there are things that are relevant today in society. Key thing is to understand how language can be manipulated

Winston's story ends but the appendix continues the novel, supposed to be an article in Oceania. Gives clues to Ingsoc's end; 'was' 'would' conditionals and past tenses show it's in the past. Similar in the handmaid's tale. Novel pointing out that the world of winston smith has been and gone, not about the future but about the past. Language and power popular to write about in essays Class and gender are issues in the book. As is race, the way it talks about race is indicative of the time period it was written in. Who is included or left out of Orwell's vision for the future? Julia and Winston's mother, is it misogynistic or feminist?...