George Orwell Research Articles

Dystopia, surveillance and the spaces of social control in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012)

Although Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (2012) does not qualify as a classic dystopia detailing a possible and undesirable future state of society, the novel shares some traits of the genre, including a protagonist struggling with a system against which she rebels. The dystopian space par excellence seems to be that delimited by the walls of the Panopticon, here an institution for young delinquents, which finds a counterpoint in the shape of an island utopia, a destination that becomes a symbol of harmony and freedom. However, panoptic space, contrary to what is asserted in the text, does not shelter the omnipresent and omniscient surveillance of which the Panopticon and Big Brother have become emblems. In contrast to the supposedly grid-like space of the Panopticon, readers find a literal space which is rich in nooks and crannies and a literary space which reveals an intertextual depth that draws, among other things, on a number of Gothic motifs. Although the text explicitly reappropriates the Panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an invention itself riven by the tension between utopia and dystopia, and echoes Michel Foucault’s strategic reading in Discipline and Punish (1975), the virulent critique it levels at the welfare state echoes some of the central issues to be found in George Orwell's attack on totalitarian states, particularly those related to memory and language. The adoption of a first-person narrator allows Fagan to speak out against surveillance that consists in control only and to oppose dehumanizing institutional discourse.

The Not-So-Silent Rise of Nationalism: A COVID-19 Result

Since the discovery and surge of the COVID-19 virus in the early days of 2020, we saw the creepy crawl of accusations and counteraccusations, the divisions between the scientific communities, the lack of exemplary conduct by the political elites, the lack of transparency in the reporting of death statistics, and the increasing lack of confidence and support for people. Amidst all this was a burgeoning of defensive and, on many occasions, offensive nationalism. A stage that mirrored resounding the amended final command from the 1924 George Orwell’s Animal farms, wherein the Pigs, the more intelligent of the manor farm animals, proclaim that some animals are more equal than others.

2+2 = 4 and 2+2 = 5 in George Orwell's 1984: A Reader-Response Analysis

In 1984, George Orwell puts in competition two propositions, logical (2+2 = 4) and dialectical (2+2 = 5), leaving the choice to the readers to appreciate and choose the better one, the one from which solutions to the challenges in the imaginary society of Oceania emerge. It is in this conflicting context that this paper attempts, through reception theory, to show that beyond Winston's logic, 2+2 equals 4 may not only represent a dogmatization of scientific reasoning but also fixed thinking. The paper argues that 2+2 = 5, in a dialectical perspective, is more illustrative of scientific thinking that is nourished by dynamism and curiosity. It denounces the abuse of the principle of relativism as presented in the novel, calling for a relativism that is not pessimistic but optimistic.

From Big Brother to the Big Bang: Self, Science, and Singularity in George Orwell’s 1984

ABSTRACT This article examines the connections between social perfectibility and individual identity through George Orwell’s famous non-place “Oceania” in 1984 (1949). It is argued that “Ingsoc” Party members see reality filtered through “collective solipsism,” which is a mirage that is superimposed upon the material state of affairs in individual perception by the augmentation of every individual’s environment with constant feedback from the social superstructure. Thus, perceptions, memories, and possibly even personalities are constructed situationally as fit for the superstructure. Due to the constantly intensifying regress of cognitive and material enabling factors, this “collective delusion” will detach itself from the material realm completely in 2050 when individual consciousness fully dissolves into Big Brother’s super-mind. 1984 thus depicts a dystopian-utopian, “blackwhite” society on the “event horizon” to a “singularity,” which will emerge when the state or collective becomes an absolute and no traces of private life remain.

Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018)

Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018)

DO POLÍTICO AO POÉTICO

Este artigo discute o uso de “Fascismo” na novela Um copo de cólera, de Raduan Nassar. Aborda-se a elasticidade dada ao termo, via George Orwell (2017), bem como os vínculos que tal conceito tem com, por exemplo, o Liberalismo e o Marxismo, à luz de Atílio Boron (2003). Feito isso, o artigo se debruça sobre o emprego do termo na novela, a saber: como ele se distancia da elaboração sofisticada que pulula as associações insólitas da escrita nassariana. Esta teria aquilo que Barthes (2004) chamaria de virtualidade da linguagem, e o que Antonio Candido (2006) coloca como “operação semântica particular”.

George Orwell is watching you! School behaviour policies and social justice

Pupil behaviour in UK schools continues to be an obsession in policy and education debate. Conservative governments, especially since 2010, have pursued an illiberal agenda which, this paper argues, is entirely associated with their project to create an education system based on performativity and competition as part of a neo-liberal economic and political culture.

Nationalism and the Nationalist Ideology in Burmese Days

ABSTRACT Although nationalism, or anticolonial nationalism, which gained momentum after the First World War, especially within the borders of the major colonial states, may not seem to be directly central to George Orwell’s Burmese Days, it incorporates a profound impact on the development of the plot leading to Flory’s suicide at the end. Taking into account the political background of the period in which the novel was written and depicts—denominating a period of about ten years in between—this article addresses the basic tenets and prevailing features of nationalist ideology and its significant place in the novel and manifests the extensiveness and profundity of the way Burmese Days is interwoven with the ideology of nationalism.

Передача окказиональной лексики в современных переводах романа Дж. Оруэлла “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (подходы Д. Л. Шепелева и Д. Н. Целовальниковой)

The purpose of the study is to identify the features of rendering nonce words in D. L. Shepelev’s and D. N. Tselovalnikova’s translations of George Orwell’s dystopia “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Main attention is paid to the vocabulary of “Newspeak”, presented in the appendix to the novel - “The Principles of Newspeak”. The paper determines the extent to which the translations of nonce words conform to the principles of compression, euphony, semantic transparency of the components and the principle of morphological uniformity. The paper is original in that it is the first to analyse the approach to rendering individual nonce words used by a representative of V. I. Bakanov’s school (D. N. Tselovalnikova). As a result, it has been found that both translations involved the use of such techniques as reduction, interfixation, calquing, transliteration and replacement of one or both parts of a compound word. The study also elicited deviation from the key principle of “Newspeak”, according to which a lexical unit should not contain more than three or four syllables. The principles of euphony and semantic transparency of the components are followed in most cases. Besides, the study revealed the difference in the translators’ attitude to the principle of morphological uniformity (according to which the same morphemes should be rendered identically in different nonce words).

Re-Animalizing Animal Farm

Interpretations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm have been almost exclusively focused on anthropocentric allegory in the text and what I call the anthropo-allegorical interpretive frame. Given Animal Farm’s iconic and enduring status in English classrooms, I unpack this process, particularly how it is informed and perpetuated by the persistence of human exceptionalism rooted in the humanist literary tradition, and hegemonic approaches to education. I employ Derridean deconstruction to critique the humanist and educational legacies that inform the largely homogenized and de-animalized interpretation and pedagogical applications of Animal Farm. Then I argue for a new, hybridized reading — and teaching — that moves beyond the anthropocentric and toward a more-than-human interpretive and pedagogical orientation that speaks to the oppressions and challenges confronting multiple species, including, but not confined, to our own.

Totalitarianism and Class Warfare in George Orwell’s Animal Farm

This article studies the struggle between classes in George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm (1945). The most suitable school of literary criticism to tackle such a subject is that of Marxism. Two basic Marxist principles are at the center of the study: class conflict and the notion of base and superstructure. The article addresses the ongoing class conflict occurring at the base between humans and pigs on the one hand and lower-class animals on the other. Three main questions have been addressed: In what ways does the upper class oppress the lower? How does the lower class respond? What is the outcome of the struggle? The study uncovers the major factors that allow the upper class to overcome the lower in Animal Farm. The lower-class response consists of both constructive and destructive attitudes. The balance is ultimately tipped towards authoritarianism, leading the animals to live in conditions worse than those of the pre-revolutionary period.

Mutation of Dystopian Identity in the Age of Posthumanism: Literary Speculations

Dystopia while deconstructing utopian ideas generates a special type of identity as a consequence of a deviation from anthropocentric principles, crises of national and cultural worldviews, and changes in manifestations of social shifting in the posthumanist world. The article has focused on four symptomatic dystopian texts – George Orwell’s Nineteen Forty-Eight, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ahmed K. Towfik’s Utopia, and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte – to explicate the dichotomous nature of the opposition of identity vs society in the posthumanist transformations. Those conditions are considered a cause of the mutation of dystopian identity that troubles its anthropological bases and modes of existence. To reconstruct the posthumanist context and its influence on the dystopian identities in the selected novels, this study has exploited a mixture of the following methods: intertextual, cultural, and genre ones; phenomenological approach; hermeneutic interpretation; conceptualisation, etc. The novelty of the study emanates from the very attempt to interpret the writers’ names of the AGEs which are represented in the books as a background of storytelling and a lens through which the posthumanist space is transformed from a dystopian perspective.

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature by Mara De Gennaro

Reviewed by: Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature by Mara De Gennaro Rachit Anand De Gennaro, Mara. Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. The anxiety about the untamable "other" delegitimizing territorial boundaries of nation-states and culturally or racially bounded communities that propel the production of identities is perhaps the most tenacious affective register of the twenty-first century. The "anxious mastery" over the "other" that building walls, anti-immigration laws, and state-sponsored violence betray is put along a comparative axis with the anxiousness of the narrator losing control over the heterogeneity of the text in Mara de Gennaro's Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature (2020). An insurmountable abyss between the narratorial desire for complete control and the swelling boundaries of the text is the spectral foundation of literary modernism. However, modernism, which sprung out of the political and social changes that Europe underwent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tends to coalesce into an idea of the human that is minimal and at its best defined only negatively, but one that is still constructed locally through its European contexts. Thus, modernist abstractions that tend to universalize the impossibility of a fixed identity must stand the test of criticisms that read a hegemonic function concealed in this universalization of absence. The most striking achievement of Modernism after Postcolonialism is an attempt to go past the self-aggrandizing polar movements of this debate. Instead of pitching claims against counterclaims, de Gennaro asks how we can refine our understanding of modernism in the wake of the achievements of postcolonialism. The imperial anxiety for mastery over the strangeness of the world beyond its limit and the anxiousness of the narrator over an uncontrollable text find their common evocative moment in George Orwell's autobiographical essay, "Shooting an Elephant." De Gennaro draws from Ranajit Guha's reading of Orwell's essay to pitch the framing problematic of her book. Traversing effortlessly between Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Lacan, Guha asks: "Can we afford to leave anxiety out of the story of the empire?" De Gennaro's key intervention in this book can be summarized using the same syntax: 'can we afford to leave modernism out of the story of postcolonialism?' While the colonizers Guha discusses in his essay (Francis Yeats-Brown and George Orwell) sustain moments of uncertainty in the face of the definite ends of the Empire, modernism, for de Gennaro, sustains the uncertainty at the heart of a conceptual hold on the heterogeneity of the postcolonial world, its narratives, and the narratorial control over a story. At issue in these narratives of "anxious mastery," for Guha as for de Gennaro, is the "uncanny realization that he [Orwell] might not do what his position of mastery demands, that he might instead act in a way that would put him outside empire's conceptual confines" [End Page 312] (2). Even though Orwell eventually shoots the unruly Elephant whose excess opened the space for the narrator's anxiety, however, the narrative itself, for de Gennaro, offers a wider possibility of apprehending a productive uncertainty in literary form. She writes, "…literary form can evoke alternative possibilities for thought and action even in texts that ostensibly deny their viability" (3). Thus, the four chapters of Modernism after Postcolonialism structurally lay a special emphasis on the swelling excess of narrative possibilities that transcend the control of the narrator. Postcolonial texts, namely, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), Aimé Césaire's Cahier d′un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) (1939), Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992), and Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones (1992) are placed along a comparative axis with Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha" (1909), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938) respectively. The matrix for these comparisons is at once the most spirited and the most arguable strand of this study. Both these senses are made palpable by paying closer attention to the book's subtitle: "Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature." By "nonterritorial," de Gennaro clarifies, she does not...

Reality as a Palimpsest: Information Disorder Practices in George Orwell’s 1984 and The Loudest Voice

Drawing upon mass communication theories, with special emphasis on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulacrum, we will examine distortion of infor- mation practices in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and in the American TV miniseries The Loudest Voice (2019). Even though there is nearly a century between both works, socio-politically speaking, the control of information dissemination is equally important in both narrative products: in the maintaining of the status quo in an authoritarian sys- tem in 1984 and in the process of undermining the current US democratic system in The Loudest Voice. With this, we will argue that these literary and audiovisual texts are key for citizens to develop critical thinking skills and to question their worldviews, or, in Or- well’s own words, to exercise an uncommon common sense, which entails independence of thought and integrity of mind.

Measurable residual disease in childhood B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Measurable residual disease in childhood B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

The Rhetoric of Inner Freedom: Possibilities and Impossibilities for Dissent in Post-1989 Romania

The well-known “resistance through culture” practiced by the philosophers of the so-called Păltiniş school in the last decade of communism sought to educate a group of men (and they were all men) in the cultural values necessary for the “regeneration” of Romanian society. The remembrance of these values was premised on the notion of “inner freedom,” an undertheorized yet familiar appeal of dissidents under conditions of repression, as it is even today. But politically, the ontology of “inner freedom” is questionable. It presupposes a metaphysics of the autonomous subject which is problematic for dissent, in that it contends that freedom of thought is possible without freedom of expression, an argument which favours quietism and may perhaps induce self-censorship or even complicity. Indeed, Herta Müller charges Gabriel Liiceanu, a leading member of the Păltiniş school, with not speaking out in order to maintain an advantageous position within the system of repression. Jean-Paul Sartre goes further in his critique of “inner freedom”: he calls it a “hoax.” George Orwell calls it a “fallacy.” For Hannah Arendt, it is derivative. I am in broad agreement with these positions. Furthermore, I argue that a conception of culture premised on the values of inner freedom and “‘not speaking out” is a conception of culture in which corruption is harbored within the concept. “Not speaking out” is conducive to and constitutive of corruption, so rife in Romania and other ex-communist societies after 1989, and hence part of the problem rather than of the solution, in ways which I demonstrate. However, I wish to put forward another conception of inner freedom, a non-metaphysical one, a positive conception for dissent today. Namely inner freedom as a rhetorical construct. Not an immaterial space which is presupposed in order to found dissent, but one which is materially formed by dissent. Arguing for inner freedom to be seen as a rhetorical response rather than a metaphysical presupposition involves showing that inner freedom is dependent on language. This I seek to do.

Investigating the Tenets of Post-structuralism in George Orwell's Animal Farm

In literary theory, the term Post-structuralism is a prominent concept which is built upon structuralism and at the same time it negates the ideas associated with that. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established, socially constructed structures. The purpose of this research was to revisit Post-Structuralism by selecting George Orwell's Animal Farm as a target text for this research. Post-Structuralists like Derrida (1966),Foucault (1994), and Barthes (1975) argue that no ultimate truth can be found with the help of binary opposition. Power and knowledge change the truth and pre-existing realities into a new phenomena. This research endorses the ideas of poststructuralists and Animal Farm offers allegorical representation which indicates a multiplicity of truth.

Science-Fiction, Techno-scientific Innovations and Political Power in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

This article is a reflection on Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the famous novels by George Orwell, a British writer and journalist. It shows through a techno-critical analysis that, although the novel is science-fiction in that it is part of a dystopian approach to the literary genre, it also inspires and expresses current techno-scientific innovations through the emblematic figure of Big Brother. Moreover, just as Big Brother is the only symbol of the INGSOC, a single political party of which O'Brien is the leader, techno-scientific innovations are more or less embodied by political powers which, if they use them to control people's lives and subject them to their ideologies, can become totalitarian and despotic, even if they were previously democratic. In this logic, they deprive people of their freedoms, especially their freedom of thought and expression.

Illusions, objectivity, and non-reductive emergentism: Reply to Rose.

In the target article, David Rose makes an interesting and substantive case against a certain kind of sceptical view: "veridical perception is impossible in principle," combined with a certain version of anti-realism. He proceeds by first illustrating several ideas from George Orwell's seminal work, and then proposes that a certain kind of non-reductive, levelled emergentist metaphysics can help us respond to such scepticism. In this commentary, I join forces with Rose's case, but will point out that we need to take seriously two discussions in contemporary philosophy in order to make the realist case stronger: the argument from illusion and hallucination, and the causal exclusion argument. Only then do Rose and his allies can have a more satisfactory case for objectivity and realism.

Transmission Mysteries: Art and Technophilia

Transmission Mysteries: Art and Technophilia