George Orwell

Biography and Historical Background

George Orwell

"1984"

Biography

Quote

George Orwell, "1984"

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

Early Years

Famous English novelist and essayist George Orwell was born in India in 1903. George Orwell, was a pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, which was his real birthname.

Orwell was educated as scholarship student at prestigious boarding schools in England. Because he came from a “lower-upper- middle class” family, he felt he did not fit in and despised dictatorial control that the schools exercised over students. After graduating from Eton went to work as a British Imperial Policeman in Burma.

LIFE EXPERIENCE

OUTCOME

• He hated his duties in Burma, where he was required to enforce the strict laws of a political regime he despised.

• He bought ragged clothes and went to live among the very poor in the London slums and published a book about his experience.

• He later lived among destitute coal miners in northern England, an experience that caused him to give up on capitalism in favor of democratic socialism.

• In 1936, he traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed firsthand the nightmarish atrocities committed by fascist political regimes.

• "Burmese Days", 1934

• "Down and Out in Paris and London", 1933

• "The Road to Wigan Pier", 1937

• "Homage to Catalonia, 1938"

Famous Critic

Through his autobiographical work about poverty in London, his experiences in colonial Burma and in the Spanish Civil War, and the plight of unemployed coal miners in England, George Orwell exposed and critiqued the human tendency to oppress others politically, economically, and physically.

He is best known for his satires of totalitarian rule: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Both books were widely considered to be indictments of Communism under Joseph Stalin, but Orwell insisted that they were critiques of totalitarian ideas in general, and warned that the nightmarish conditions he depicted could take place anywhere. In 1950 Orwell succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 46.

Style

"1984"

George Orwell’s 1984 is a defining example of dystopian fiction ; it envisions a future where society is in decline, totalitarianism has created vast inequities, and innate weaknesses of human nature keep the characters in a state of conflict and unhappiness. Orwell satirizes elements here to demonstrate the authoritarian tendency to suspending reality.

Science Fiction

Dystopia

Satire

Dystopian Fiction

Elements

Dystopia

• "1984" implies that the human race will only get worse if man’s lust for power and capacity for cruelty go uncorrected.
• Characters live in fear of wars, government surveillance, and political oppression of free speech.
• The London of the novel is dirty and crumbling, with food shortages, exploding bombs, and miserable citizens.
• The government is an all-powerful force of oppression and control, and crushes the characters’ identities and dreams. This dystopian vision of the future, written thirty-five years before the year the novel is set, suggests that man’s inherent nature is corrupt and repressive.
• Orwell wrote the book in the aftermath of World War II and the rise of fascism in Germany and the Soviet Union, and paints a pessimistic picture of society’s ability to avoid further global disasters.

A state in which the conditions of human life are extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror (or all three). A dystopian society is characterized by human misery in the form of squalor, oppression, disease, overcrowding, environmental destruction, or war. Dystopian fiction worlds tend to contain many of the same narrative features. Common elements of dystopian fiction include societies engaged in forever wars, and characterized by extreme social and economic class divides, mass poverty, environmental devastation, anarchy, and loss of individuality.

Elements

Science Fiction

A form of fiction that deals principally with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals. The customary elements in science fiction include prophetic warnings, utopian aspirations, elaborate scenarios for entirely imaginary worlds, titanic disasters, strange voyages, and political agitation of many extremist flavours, presented in the form of sermons, meditations, satires, allegories, and parodies—exhibiting every conceivable attitude toward the process of techno-social change.Science fiction writers often seek out new scientific and technical developments in order to prognosticate freely the techno-social changes that will shock the readers’ sense of cultural propriety and expand their consciousness.

• Depicts a future civilization that incorporates yet undeveloped technologies and scientific advancements.
• Frightening future vision to a very familiar wartime London.
• Futuristic inventions not drastically different from familiar technologies.
• Today, many of the developments Orwell predicts are commonplace to readers, such as the helicopters that spy on citizens, which anticipate surveillance drones.
• In other ways, his science fiction vision of the future is inaccurate. He failed to anticipate the way people would use technology to record themselves, and willingly share their private lives with the public.

Dystopian Fiction

"Orwellian"

Dystopian fiction usually works backward from the present to find an explanation for the fictional society’s decline, and thus to provide a commentary on the reader’s society or a warning of how the future could turn out. Dystopian novels explore the effects of oppression and totalitarianism on the individual psyche as well as how the individual functions in a repressive society.

Satire

Elements

Artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform. "1984" is a satire of totalitarian governments and what might happen if the government was allowed to be in complete and total control of the people.

Humor, irony and exaggeration are used to critizise the folowing aspects:

• The division of the world by the super states.
• The mass media as an agent of "prolerisation."
• Power-hunger in general.
• The betrayal by the intellectuals.
• The abuse and degradation of languages for purposes of control.
• The rewriting of history for political purposes

Historical Context

Quote

George Orwell, "1984"

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Totalitarian dictatorship was a phenomenon first localized in 20th-century Europe

Totalitarianism is a form of government that permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual and private life to the authority of the state. By the beginning of World War II, totalitarian had become synonymous with absolute and oppressive single-party government. The totalitarian state pursues some special goal, such as industrialization or conquest, to the exclusion of all others. All resources are directed toward its attainment, regardless of the cost. Famous examples of totalitarian states in Europe include, the Facist state of Italy under Mussolini, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh

Fascism, political ideology and mass movement that dominated many parts of central, southern, and eastern Europe between 1919 and 1945 and that also had adherents in western Europe, the United States, South Africa, Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East. Europe’s first fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, took the name of his party from the Latin word fasces, which referred to a bundle of elm or birch rods (usually containing an ax) used as a symbol of penal authority in ancient Rome. Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation. At the end of World War II, the major European fascist parties were broken up, and in some countries (such as Italy and West Germany) they were officially banned. Beginning in the late 1940s, however, many fascist-oriented parties and movements were founded in Europe as well as in Latin America and South Africa. Although some European “neofascist” groups attracted large followings, especially in Italy and France, none were as influential as the major fascist parties of the interwar period.

Facism (fæʃ.ɪ.zəm)Benito Mussolini

Fascism is a generic name for a particular brand of totalitarian regime, which made its appearance in Europe between 1922 and 1936. The name taken from the Latin fasces was coined by Mussolini, whose National fascist party in Italy was the first such group to gain power

The fascists of the 1920s and 1930s shared a number of political beliefs, organizational methods, psychological traits, and common enemies:

• Excessively nationalistic believing their country was superior to all others and had a unique destiny
• Aimed to build a new social order dominated by a new sort of human being.
• Emphasis on collective life of the nation and its destiny rather than the development of the individual
• Led by charismatic politicians many times with some military background posing to be the nation´s supreme chief
• Total power to the party and government control of all spheres of life.
• Raised special forces to defend the party and control the army.
• Strong focus on education and youth with intense use of propaganda technology.
• Full of hatred and resentment

NazismAdolf Hitler

Nazism was totalitarian movement led by Adolf Hitler as head of the Nazi Party in Germany. In its intense nationalism, mass appeal, and dictatorial rule, Nazism shared many elements with Italian fascism. However, Nazism was far more extreme both in its ideas and in its practice:

• Aimed at building a new social order in Germany to prepare the Nation for fighting in order to establish a German Empire.
• Believed certain human races were superior and more developed than others and the more advanced ones were entitled to conquer or even eliminate the weaker ones.
• The Jew was the sly and clever archenemy, who was regarded as the enemy of all races blamed for Germany's defeat in the First World War and the Great Depression. The nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale to rid Europe of its Jewish population.
• Rejected democracy and liberal values, and aimed to be ruled by a new authoritarian élite of “supermen.”
• Believed society should serve the interests of the national community.
• An elite guard and executive force known as the SS was prepared to carry out all security-related duties to protect the party’s interest.
• The Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, that fostered Nazi, ideals were formed.
• Controlled all forms of communication through censorship and propaganda.
• A variety of propaganda tools were implemented to spread Nazi ideas.

Communist Party of the Soviet Union(CPSU) Joseph Stalin

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union arose from the Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party. The only brand of communism which was able to take over a state. Fell under Stalin’s power in 1922 and underwent major changes. He:

• Aspired to world supremacy.
• Laid emphasis on the collective aspects of political life, minimizing the rights and interests of individual citizens to create “builders of socialism.”
• Ruled by terror and with a totalitarian grip in order to eliminate anyone who might oppose him. Eternally seeking enemies “within and without.”
• Expanded the powers of the secret police (NKVD), encouraged citizens to spy on one another and had millions of people killed or sent to the Gulag (system of forced labor camps).
• Instituted the Great Purge: series of campaigns designed to rid those he considered a threat.
• Built a cult of personality around himself in the Soviet Union.

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky was a close associate of Russian revolutionary Lenin and later the chief rival of Stalin, the latter of whom branded Trotsky a traitor and expelled him from the Soviet Union in 1929. While in exile in Mexico, Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed, denouncing Stalin and the Soviet Union. During the Great Purges of the 1930s when Stalin consolidated his power by killing and imprisoning many of the early members of the Bolshevik party, Stalin's propaganda invariably depicted Trotsky as the instigator of all supposed plots and acts of sabotage. In August 1940, an assassin called Ramon Mercader, acting on Stalin's orders, murdered Trotsky.

Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect, and unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.George Orwell.

Questions?

Write them down and bring them to class.

Home