Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four Research Articles

Cosmetics as Tools of Resistance and Survival in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract: Wearing makeup may not be merely a perfunctory beauty ritual in The Sheltering Sky and Nineteen Eighty-Four . This essay reads it as an act of defiance and emancipation that begins with the woman's face, using the very objects that putatively contribute to the objectification of women. In these novels—written by western white men in 1949—the restorative properties of makeup enunciate Kit and Julia's desire to restore their own existential image in a world that oppresses and dehumanizes women. Employing Lacan's gaze theory as its primary methodology, this study sheds light on how cosmetics are portrayed as front-line defenses of feminine identity—especially needed in hard times and dystopian contexts.

Why Would Some Feminist Activists Want to Ban Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Why Shouldn’t They?

This article critically engages with the feminist discourse surrounding George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a specific focus on the calls for its prohibition arising from perceived gender biases. The central inquiry at the heart of this exploration revolves around whether the perceived gender discrimination in Nineteen Eighty-Four warrants its prohibition. Detractors posit that Orwell's delineation of women, especially through characters like Julia, reinforces entrenched gender norms. Conversely, proponents assert that the novel's core message transcends gender-specific concerns, functioning as an enduring cautionary tale against the deleterious effects of totalitarian regimes. The article succinctly encapsulates the prevailing feminist critique of Nineteen Eighty-Four, undertaking an examination of the representation of women and gender relationships within the dystopian framework. Scholars argue that Julia's character epitomizes a passive and objectified perspective of women, conforming to male desires and perpetuating patriarchal viewpoints. This scrutiny extends to the thematic suppression of sexuality and gender within dystopian literature, underscoring the novel's limitations in addressing gender-related intricacies. Drawing upon feminist literary criticism and amalgamating various theoretical approaches such as historical context analysis, textual scrutiny, and thematic exploration, the article advocates for the legitimacy and significance of the critique. Despite the manifestation of patriarchal ideologies in the portrayal of women in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the article delves deeper into the pervasive theme of patriarchal control in the narrative. It examines how the Party regulates reproduction and sustains gender norms, contending that the novel persists in its relevance by fostering discussions on oppressive governance and authoritarian control. The paper accentuates the novel's nuanced exploration of gender dynamics, implicitly challenging traditional constructions. Emphasizing the value of dystopian fiction in feminist discourse, the article highlights the role of Nineteen Eighty-Four in catalyzing conversations about gender equality and institutional reform. In conclusion, the article addresses the perils associated with the misuse of censorship mechanisms for literary works and advocates for the preservation of a diverse literary discourse. The proposition to ban Nineteen Eighty-Four based on its gender portrayal is posited as counterproductive, with the potential to stifle critical engagement and impede meaningful dialogue. The ongoing controversy surrounding the novel underscores the imperative of sustained discussions, encouraging readers to scrutinize and challenge prevailing gender and political norms. Ultimately, Nineteen Eighty-Four is positioned as a valuable work contributing to broader narratives of social justice and equality.

A Review on National and International Security Approach in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four Works

George Orwell 1984 adlı eser bir distopya olarak yazılmış olsa da Soğuk Savaş döneminin gelecekteki yansıma ve sonuçları üzerine analizi, yazar tarafından romanlaştırılarak aktarılmasına sebep olmuştur. 1984 adlı eser üzerine pek çok çalışma gerçekleştirilmiştir. Ancak istihbarat ve güvenlik üzerine akademik incelemeler yeterli sayıda değildir. George Orwell’in 1984 adlı eseri Alman faşizminden, iktidarın düşman yaratarak kitleleri kontrol edip bu sayede rejimi güçlü tutmanın yollarını eserinde göstermiştir. George Orwell’in güvenlik ve istihbarat yaklaşımı 21. yüzyıl uluslararası sistemine de benzemektedir. Özellikle George Orwell’in yazmış olduğu 1984 adlı eserde iç güvenlik çalışmaları günümüz Orta Doğu muhaberat sistemine de benzemektedir. 1984 adlı eserde düşman yaratmak ve yaratılan düşman ile birlikte tehdit ve risk unsurlarının spesifik bir şekilde belirtilmesi eseri ayrıca dikkat çekici bir hale getirmektedir. Çalışmanın amacı 1984 adlı eserinin güvenlik yaklaşımı incelenmesidir. Özellikle otoriter rejimlerin istihbarat ve kolluk kuvvetleri ile toplumların kontrol edilmesi ve otoriter rejimlerin toplumları terörize etme durumu incelenmiştir.

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.

Memory of the Present

Memory of the Present Elana Gomel (bio) Carter F. Hanson. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future. Routledge, 2020. xvii + 199 pp. $160 hc. Utopia is about the future; memory is about the past. This seems so self-evident that the notion that memory can play a constitutive role in utopia appears far-fetched. If utopia is a vision of an ideal future, then it has to reject the less than ideal past. In many utopian texts, historical and individual memory is treated as a danger that must be regulated, contained, or expunged. Dystopia, utopia's dark twin, is generally hostile to memory, as in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the repression of historical memory is necessary to maintain the oppressive regime of Ingsoc. But can utopia and memory be reconciled? In this interesting book, Carter F. Hanson makes a case that they can. If I am not entirely persuaded by his argument, I still believe it opens up a new field of inquiry. Citing cognitive research, Hanson argues that memory is intrinsic to anticipation: "the conscious imagining or subconscious wish-dreaming of a better future must also draw on memories of our pasts" (xv). Thus, he posits that "memory is fundamental to and constitutive of utopianism, and that within the more specific domain of literary utopias, memory and forgetting often function as vital and complex components of a text's utopian impulse" (xvi). Of course, arguing that memory is constitutive of utopianism is not the same thing as showing that memory is an issue in literary utopias. Hanson's book does an admirable job of the latter, situating literary utopias in the context of the "memory wars" of modernity, in which individual and collective memories are contested by emerging ideologies. The claim that memory is necessary for utopia is more problematic, however, running into the thorny thicket of definitions and historical periodization. The book is wide ranging in its scope, covering texts from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993), M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002), and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). Not only are these texts written in different countries and in different historical periods, but they also embody incompatible views of what constitutes a perfect society. Bellamy's industrial and regimented socialism would be seen as a nightmare in Piercy's pastoral communitarianism; Le Guin's "ambiguous utopia" is saved by science, which dooms humanity in Atwood. [End Page 160] Moreover, half of the texts Hanson discusses are dystopias, presenting a future society that is considerably worse than the present. It seems that at least implicitly he adopts the view of Krishan Kumar, who argues in Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987) that the two genres are structurally the same, and that dystopias offer a critique of the utopian vision based on an anti-utopian ideology. Later in the book, however, Hanson distinguishes between utopia and the utopian impulse, which is an open-ended desire for something different from the present state of the world. The problem is that all the novels he discusses are utopias and dystopias in the formal sense: texts that represent a blueprint for the future rooted in a specific ideology. The book is somewhat uneasily poised between utopia and utopianism, just as it is uneasily poised between memory as a psychological faculty and memory as a collective praxis. To adapt Donald Spence's distinction between narrative and historical truth, the book deals with memory as cultural narrative, while conflating it with the cognitive ability to retain information about the historical past. In his discussion of Thomas More's Utopia, Hanson acknowledges that social perfection requires suppression or regulation of cultural memory: "Utopia largely dispenses with history and thus with the contingencies of memory" (19). This juxtaposition of history and utopia is a frequent claim in conservative critiques of the utopian project, as in Emil Cioran's History and Utopia (1960). Indeed, Nineteen Eighty...

Viewing Orwellian Newspeak from the Angle of Linguistics: An “Economic” Redundancy

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has been widely studied, but not one of his important inventions in that novel. That is his Newspeak. From the perspective of linguistics, one of the most important characteristics of the development of language(s) is the feature of the economy, which means that language evolves in various ways to streamline and make it easier for its users to express themselves. This is not the case with the English variant "Newspeak" created by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is somehow simpler in form than standard English, which was named "Oldspeak", but "Newspeak" is actually in a sense simpler than "Oldspeak". Newspeak" is actually much more obscure than "Old speech" in a sense. The reason for this may be found in comparison with several typical language simplification movements. In order to investigate the issues, former researchers` findings would be referenced, and textual evidence would be found and discussed in the article.

The Perception of Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism in Various Universitas Andalas Students

This research studies the readers' responses to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four regarding their perception of totalitarianism and authoritarianism in various Universitas Andalas students as based on the said novel. This research focuses on how the novel's readers understand totalitarianism and authoritarianism after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Furthermore, this research also investigates the readers' answer on why they relate those mentioned concepts to their lives based on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In analyzing the readers' responses, we apply a reader-response theory that focuses solely on the object's extrinsic elements, that is, in this case, the readers. As for the study method, we utilize the quantitative mixed with the qualitative method and library research.

Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought: Narratives of World Politics

Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought: Narratives of World Politics

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-apocalypse: Classics—New Tendencies—Model Interpretations

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-apocalypse: Classics—New Tendencies—Model Interpretations

‘The object of power is power’: tautology, paranoia, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

ABSTRACTBuilding on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's claim that paranoid modes of reading are ‘strongly tautological,’ this essay begins its exploration of the relationship between tautology and paranoia by suggesting that tautological forms of expression can be read as symptomatic of paranoia. Following a comparison of Lacan's description of the paranoiac's linguistic dysfunction with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Roland Barthes's, and Immanuel Kant's analyses of tautology, the relationship between tautology and paranoia is then developed through a reading of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). While in Orwell's novel tautology appears symptomatic of paranoia insofar as the Party's rejection of old systems of meaning – produces new systems that are tautological, the fact that Winston Smith's specific form of paranoia burgeons following a refusal to accept the tautological irrationality of the new symbolic order suggests that tautology might also operate in the precipitation of paranoia. Turning finally to a comparison of Winston's psychosis with Eric Santner's reading of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's paranoia, which, similarly to Winston's, also results from a confrontation with tautological symbolic lack, this essay reveals such lack as an unnerving point of convergence between the totalitarian state envisioned by Orwell and the modern democratic social structures Santner studies—a claim that I exemplify by examining British Prime Minister Theresa May’s tautology ‘Brexit means Brexit.'

Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Treatise on Tyranny

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four portrayed the societal antithesis of modern liberalism, and in so doing, established the adjective "Orwellian" in popular use. Orwell's novel thematically represents conceptual frameworks of tyrannical governance. Recently, questions regarding a crisis of democratic liberalism have prompted debate, discussion, and study. This article investigates how Orwell characterises the processes by which totalitarianism develops, delineates the nature of autocratic governance, and describes how totalitarianism achieves continuity. Further, this article parallels the typologies of tyranny, developed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the modern world. I seek to detail the ways in which Orwell's novel is a cautionary, critical commentary of totalitarianism relevant to contemporary society.

Digital Dystopia: Surveillance, Autonomy, and Social Justice in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

This essay proposes Gary Shteyngart's dystopian satire, Super Sad True Love Story, as an appropriate heuristic model for understanding surveillance and society in the twenty-first century. While George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four remains influential, many of his observations now seem anachronistic. Shteyngart, it is argued, offers a more appropriate vision for our world of decentralized digital "surveillant assemblages" that maintain a "control society" with little need for a Big Brother–like state. Unlike Orwell, who predicted the "proles" would be relatively free from surveillance, Shteyngart also emphasizes the disproportionate impact of surveillance on different sections of society. Finally, this essay turns to the thorny question of personal liberty and autonomy as a justification for the right to privacy and as a central theme within the dystopian genre. Many critics argue that dystopian literature is inherently reactionary because of its anti-utopianism and individualism. This essay, however, argues that the kind of autonomy that privacy activists and dystopian novelists most often wish to defend should be understood not as a self-sufficiency but as personhood that is socially embedded and politically engaged, and, crucially, a necessary but insufficient precondition for the resistance and refusal of digital mass surveillance.

Orwell's Satirical View of Romantic Love in the Terrorized World of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The beginning of twentieth century was accompanied with the prevailing current of technology in different aspects of human life. At first, it incited a positive stimulus which could build a utopian world on the advancement of technology. However, the bloody World Wars averted this view and the technological utopia was replaced by Orwellian dystopia. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satirical work which moves against Wells' utopian toward the reflection of a distorted technological society. Undoubtedly, satire is the best literary mode for dystopic depiction of the world specifically the one portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston Smith, the central character of this novel, is lower from his society in terms of intelligence and power of action. Therefore, he is put under rigid controls and brainwashing. And at last, he awfully rejects his love in favor the principles of the Party. Thus, in this study, we try to investigate Winston's romantic life in a satiric manner with respect to Northrop Frye's theme of romance which includes the three phase of agon, pathos and anagnorisis.

The Future-as-Past in Dystopian Fiction

Most twentieth-century dystopian fictions such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night (1937), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and John Wyndham's The Chrysalids (1955) adhere to a generic convention by which they project forward into a narrated future to look back critically toward the present. In this focus on the past, such dystopias include slivers of contested and incomplete accounts of how the dystopian state came to exist, here termed future histories. Such accounts exist in a time frame that runs from the authorial present to the point in the future at which the main narrative is set. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, this time frame runs from 1949 (the publication date) to 1984, when the main story occurs. The time frame between the authorial present and the future temporal setting of the main story world is here termed the future-as-past. This article explores the development of the complex temporality of dystopian fiction from the early to the mid-twentieth century. Discussion focuses on the manner in which the fragmented future-as-past is employed critically in relation to the story world and to historical reality. By providing scattered hints from which further information can be deduced or inferred, often but not always with the help of contextual knowledge, this temporal narrative strategy invites the reader to actively participate and politically engage in the reconstruction of future histories. Such future histories can never be completed or fully mapped as dystopian fictions and are usually less specifically predictive than they at first appear.

Assessing the Quality of Persian Translation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four Based on House's Model: Overt-covert Translation Distinction

This study aimed to assess the quality of Persian translation of Orwell's (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four by Balooch (2004) based on House's (1997) model of translation quality assessment. To do so, about 10 percent of the source text was randomly selected. The profile of the source text register was produced and the genre was realized. The source text profile was compared to the translation text profile. The result of this comparison was dimensional mismatches and overt errors. The dimensional mismatches were categorized based on different dimensions of register. The overt errors which were based on denotative mismatches and target system errors were categorized into omissions, additions, substitutions, and breaches of the target language system. Then, the frequencies of occurrences of subcategories of overt errors along with their percentages were calculated. The dimensional mismatches and a large number of major overt errors including omissions and substitutions indicated that the translation was not in accordance with the House's view stating that literary works needed to be translated overtly. Mismatches on different levels of register showed that the cultural filter was applied in translation and the second-level functional equivalence required for overt translation was not reached. Therefore, the Persian translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four did not fulfill the criteria to be an overt translation.

Assessing the Quality of Persian Translation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four Based on House's Model: Overt-covert Translation Distinction

This study aimed to assess the quality of Persian translation of Orwell's (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four by Balooch (2004) based on House's (1997) model of translation quality assessment. To do so, about 10 percent of the source text was randomly selected. The profile of the source text register was produced and the genre was realized. The source text profile was compared to the translation text profile. The result of this comparison was dimensional mismatches and overt errors. The dimensional mismatches were categorized based on different dimensions of register. The overt errors which were based on denotative mismatches and target system errors were categorized into omissions, additions, substitutions, and breaches of the target language system. Then, the frequencies of occurrences of subcategories of overt errors along with their percentages were calculated. The dimensional mismatches and a large number of major overt errors including omissions and substitutions indicated that the translation was not in accordance with the House's view stating that literary works needed to be translated overtly. Mismatches on different levels of register showed that the cultural filter was applied in translation and the second-level functional equivalence required for overt translation was not reached. Therefore, the Persian translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four did not fulfill the criteria to be an overt translation.

Urban Panopticism and Heterotopic Space in Kafka’s <em>Der Process</em> and Orwell’s <em>Nineteen Eighty-Four</em>

Lamenting the doors, locks, bolts, chains, massy and grated windows of his urban confinement, eponymous narrator of William Godwin's 1794 novel Caleb Williams concludes, is society.' While visibility of these bolts and chains may have decreased, they still very much characterized European novelistic metropolis over a century later. In Kafka's Der Proces (The Trial, 1925) and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), disciplinary mechanisms of their dystopian visions transform their fictional cities into microcosms of what Michel Foucault calls l'archipel (the carceral archipelago).'This essay examines effects of penitential existence of Josef K. and Winston Smith, respective protagonists of these two novels, on their mental and corporeal functioning, and explores ways which they negotiate spaces of difference city. It argues that denizens of these novels' metropolises are inmates, body and soul, to regimes whose agendas are to construct them as conforming subjects both senses of term. Firstly, they are subjects insofar as they still possess a degree of autonomous agency. Despite K.'s arrest, for example, he is in [seiner] gewohnlichen Lebensweise nicht gehindert (not impeded from going about [his] ordinary way of life).3 Secondly, and more pertinently, they are subjects inasmuch as they are agents of their own subjection to norms of their respective societies. Given resonance of these issues of discipline and incarceration with theories of Foucault, it seems apposite to draw primarily on two Foucauldian spatial articulations of power and resistance order to analyze relationship these texts between city and its subjects-namely, panopticism and heterotopia.The provenance of panopticism, which is discussed first part of this essay, is Panopticon popularized by eighteenth-century Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.4 An institutional prison-house whose inmates may be observed without knowing when or whether they are under inspection, Panopticon was considered by Foucault to be le diagramme d'un mecanisme de pouvoir ramene a sa forme ideale (the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form).5 In his Surveiller et punir {Discipline and Punish, 1975), Foucault neologizes panopticism to describe a form of power relying not on overt repression, but rather upon continuous surveillance of a population and consequent strict regulation of body. The latter part of this essay investigates heterotopias. In a lecture entitled Des espaces (Of Other Spaces, 1967)/' Foucault appropriates this medical term to describe heterogeneous spaces of alterity that operate nonhegemonic conditions. As contreemplacements (counteremplacements) possessing la curieuse propriete d'etre en rapport avec tous les autres emplacements, mais sur un mode tel qu'ils suspendent, neutralisent ou inversent l'ensemble des rapports qui se trouvent, par eux, designes (the curious property of being relation with all other sites, but such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert set of relations designated),' heterotopias dismantle conventional order of space and function as ambiguous loci of possibility, situated between limits of one episteme and beginnings of another. Both of these spatial concepts serve to shape and regulate conduct of protagonists of novels question. Panopticism induces a paranoiac feeling of conscious and permanent visibility subjects, inaugurating their internalization of subjugating gaze. This instigates an automatic, quasi-instinctive regime of self-discipline that visibly manifests itself bodily behavior. Located at interstices of metropolis, heterotopias are frequently (but not always) characterized these novels as countersites of resistance that challenge orthodox ideology, affording protagonists glimpses of an alternative existence. …

I sing the body dystopic: Utopia and posthuman corporeality in P.D. James’s The Children of Men

The resurgence of novels dealing with dystopian cosmogonies since the 1990s may reveal a new trend in Utopian Studies. If classical dystopia was defined by the imposition of collective political and social structures upon the individual and out of which there was no escape (as constructed, mainly, by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four), these contemporary dystopian novels critically construct posthuman societies where the focus is on the development of the dystopian body, which questions and reinvents the very definitions of humanity. This article aims at examining the effects of posthuman critique upon the construction of the dystopian body in P.D. James's novel The Children of Men.

From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

Reading for Our Future

In dystopian novels the future is often imagined as a place where to read is a disappearing art. For the oppressed women in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, for example, reading is something close to a ‘sin’ and only during an affair is the heroine, Offred, permitted to engage in such ‘illicit’ activity. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, to read is fraught with difficulties because books are subject to a process of ‘continuous alteration’: ‘All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary’. Perhaps most dramatically, in Doris Lessing's The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, set after a future ice age, an ancient library is destroyed when it is exposed to the air: ‘The scribes were trying to sort the books into languages they knew, but … as each was opened, it began to crumble. Dann, desperate, grief-stricken, grabbed up book after book and saw it disintegrate in his hands.’1