George Orwell

The subject of semiotics is not to answer the questions such as what does the text says, who says the text, or what are the possible external— societal, individual, and historical—effects on the text. Instead, it is mainly interested in how signs are created, how they are articulated with each other to create the meaning in the text, and in what ways the meaning is created in different semantic layers within its system. The study necessitates focusing on the relations of the formative elements in the text which leads us to reach the narrative syntax that makes it possible to observe the underlying structures in different semantic strata of the text. Moreover, the approach helps us to analyze the meaning production process, as well as to observe the ways of the articulation process of meaningful items with each other to create the whole text.  The main purpose of this study is to figure out the semantic organization of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four narrative within the scope of Greimas's semiotic trajectory.

O presente artigo tem como objetivo discutir a figuração da guerra no romance distópico 1984 de George Orwell, tendo como parâmetros analíticos a espetacularização da violência e a instrumentalização da guerra como mecanismos de controle social e de estabilização do regime totalitário figurado na obra.

This article addresses the charge that the introduction of the electric light in the late nineteenth century increased disruptions to the human body's biological processes and interfered with the oscillating sleeping-waking cycle. By considering the nineteenth century research into the factors that motivate and disrupt sleep in concert with contemporary discussions of the physiology of street lighting, this article exposes how social and political forces shaped the impact of artificial light on sleep and, more perniciously, on bodily autonomy. As a close reading of artificial light in three influential dystopian novels building on these historical contexts demonstrates, dystopian fiction challenges the commonplace assumption that the advent of the electric light, or of widespread street lighting in public urban spaces, posed an immediate or inherent threat to sleep. Beginning with H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes (1899), in which the eponymous sleeper emerges from a cataleptic trance into a future in which electric light and power are used to control the populace, representations of artificial light in early dystopian fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depict a nightmare of total illumination in which the state exerted its control over the individual. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), constant artificial illumination plays a vital role in the chemical and behavioural conditioning undergone by individuals in a post-Fordian world. George Orwell intensifies this relationship between light and individual autonomy in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where access to electric current (and thus light) is limited at certain times of the day, brownouts and electrical rationing occur intermittently, and total illumination is used to torture and reprogram individuals believed to have betrayed Big Brother.

There are few 20th century writers as collectable as George Orwell.
Rare book auctions regularly fetch extraordinary prices, especially
for his works published in the 1930s. Even secondhand bookshops
have a paucity of battered paperbacks on display. Orwell sells and
readers hold on to their copies.

English author George Orwell (1903-1950)'s novella Animal Farm novel entitled The Sultan of the Elephants and the Red-Bearded Lame Ant (1975) depicts elephants and ants in an anthropomorphic portrayal of totalitarianism. This study intends to disentangle two authors' socialist realist depiction thorough these works from distinct literatures. Therefore, the study aims at comparing and contrasting Orwell's and Kemal's selected works to indicate how socialist realism functions through the genre, characters and content in the works. The study applies for the tenets of socialist realist literature stated by Maxim Gorky (1868-1963), who is among the leading founders of socialist realist literary theory, to enrich the close reading of the selected works. The analysis indicates that although they appeared in content within the context of socialist realism. However, while Animal Farm warns against the betrayal of the revolution through his suspicious approach to the realisation of a socialist society, The Sultan of the Elephants and the Red-Bearded Lame Ant creates hope out of despair for a socialist society.

1. Quote/Unquote Philosophers like other people often have a weakness for quiz-shows. And like the crew in the Hunting of the Snark, they are all of them fond of quotations 1 . So I begin with a quotation and a question. The quotation comes from a famous o indeed a ‘superstar’ o text. But which text? Which famous writer indicted these lines? The purpose of the universal jargon was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of logical empiricism, but to make other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when the universal jargon had been adopted for all and the metaphysically infected terminology forgotten, a metaphysical thought o that is a thought diverging from what logical empiricism regarded as genuinely thinkable o should be literally unthinkable, at least in so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a log...

This article discusses how utopian and anti-utopian literatures offer alternate visions to find connecting links between the control of space, power and happiness. The focus is on three classics of utopian and dystopian literatures: Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Through the analysis of these works it is pondered how utopian and anti-utopian societies offer freedom or restrict inhabitants moving and acting in their worlds, and how this is portrayed as a means to measure the quality of life. The article contributes to socially critical literary geography by envisioning various options to imagine the relationship of space and power. The starting presumption in the article is that both utopian and anti-utopian imaginations suggest that freedom to use space is a key factor when defining human happiness.

A rare and lost preface to Animal farm; novella written by George Orwell. This preface better known as Freedom to Press was written by Orwell himself and It gives equal cult to the topic which Orwell tried to heed on. I just edited it into readable PDF.

When mentioning the role of language in characterisation in the dystopian novel, we must remember that little has been written on this. It is almost as if there is general consensus that characters in dystopia are in themselves uninteresting, that they only serve an ideological/philosophical/political role, and that characterisation here is not elaborated, i.e. that these characters are psychologically “incomplete” for the simple reason that their authors see no need for this. The origins of this are found in the prejudice that “complete” and psychologically motivated characters are found in literary Realism, or at least something that resembles the style of Realism. Yet nothing could be further from the truth – it results from a transformation of aesthetic procedure, and it is required of the reader that he or she put in more effort in the novel’s reception.

This article examines the special contribution to Orwell
Studies made by American academics Peter Stansky and
William Abrahams in their pioneering biographies. He
concludes that, above all, their works serve to emphasise ‘the
seminal importance of Orwell’s early life to the understanding
of his literary development’.

Since the birth of modernity, Western thought has been at war with clichés. The association of philosophical and cultural integrity with originality, and the corresponding need for invention and novelty, has been a distinct concern of a whole spectrum of ideas and movements, from Nietzsche’s polemics against the ‘herd’, the ‘shock of the new’ of the artistic avant-garde, the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture, to Orwell’s defence of political dialogue from ‘dying metaphors’.

This book is the first examination of the cliché as a philosophical concept. Challenging the idea that clichés are lazy or spurious opposites to genuine thinking, it instead locates them as a dynamic and contestable boundary between ‘thought’ and ‘non-thought’. It unpacks the constituent phenomena of clichés – repetition, the readymade, same-ness – through readings of ‘anti-philosophical’ thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sloterdijk, and Groys, within sites of the cliché in practice: memorial poppies, cinematic reboots, art installations and more.

Rejecting the idea that clichés should be dismissed out of hand on normative frameworks of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ thinking, or ‘new’ and ‘old’ ideas, it instead interrogates the material, cultural and archival ground on which these frameworks are built.

The Iron Heel has attracted the attention of literary critics and revolutionaries alike for its prescient insights into 20th-century politics, including the rise of fascism in Europe. In his critique of the novel, Leon Trotsky praises Jack London’s “historical foresights,” concluding “we cannot help inclining before the powerful intuition of the revolutionary artist.” However, despite Trotsky’s admiration for London, his claim ultimately limits the novel to a work of speculation without fully acknowledging its purpose as speculative fiction: to form a literary model of political conversion and preservation. Using what Trotsky calls “artistic qualities,” London aims to convert audiences by merging socialist ideology with storytelling not only to spread what he deems “excellent propaganda,” but also to demonstrate fiction’s capacity to preserve political memory. London expands Trotsky’s “intuition” notion to encompass the novel’s speculative elements, such as the recovered-manuscript frame, that enable its political messages to remain timely beyond the early 20th-century. In doing so, London redefines Trotsky’s “revolutionary artist” claim by using speculative fiction to enact artistic and political action through future revolutionaries who took inspiration from The Iron Heel, namely George Orwell.

All the movements and revolutions in the world’s history have been initiated and reinforced by a systematized structure of standards, opinions and thoughts establishing the foundations of political, social or economic perspectives known as ideology. Ideology plays a vital role when the dimension of translation is added to the argument, for in addition to the author’s ideas and attitudes of the world, the translator’s beliefs and value systems as the medium between two cultures come to bear upon the translated product. In Iran, the 1979 Islamic revolution changed the ideological system from the secular to a markedly religious (Islamic) one and this has increasingly influenced the way in which the cultural products are produced and/or translated. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) is one of the most retranslated novels in both the pre- and post-revolution era in Iran. This article presents a semiotic analysis on the cover page of Orwell’s novel and its Persian translations at both the...

We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. Many of these routine transgressions will be understood in ‘revelatory’ terms, as peeling back the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, ‘truth’. Others will be recognized as calculated marketing exercises that simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism.

Yet these ‘ordinary’ scandals can themselves be seen to be largely derivative of another, altogether more fundamental—and fundamentally rare—form of disruption. Such is the real scandal that accompanies instances of authentic creation. Building on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Scandalous Times not only argues the case for such ‘real scandal’, but also shows how it is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy.

From Duchamp to Donald Trump, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas from art and advertising to politics and social media have come to actively contribute to this ‘static’ fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creativity as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy.

“Alex Ling presents a powerful argument on the nature of scandal and pseudo-scandal today through a concise and lucid account of Alain Badiou’s theory of being and the scandalous event that occasionally irrupts within it, allowing for the possibility of real change. This is a truly striking demonstration of the extraordinary potential of Badiou’s thought for critical theory and cultural studies. It should be studied for its exemplary methodology as much for its original readings and conclusions.” Kenneth Reinhard, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

“Alex Ling’s Scandalous Times is a lucid argument that the realm of contemporary scandal is one in which everything changes so everything can stay the same. Against this conservatism, Ling provides a philosophical defence of the real scandal that would overturn our scandalous reality.” Benjamin Noys, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Chichester, UK

“Alex Ling turns a much needed philosophical gaze on scandals, one of those key yet widely misunderstood concepts currently shaping our reactionary political age. Ling’s lucid, challenging and thoroughly engaging analysis forces us to think of our current political moment as one saturated with ‘simulacral scandals’ (or state-sanctioned controversies), both perversely satisfying an inevitable demand for shock and horror in times such as ours, and precluding any real change. Building on Badiouian philosophy, this timely and powerful book is not just a sharp and original account of how to think about scandals and the role they play in our societies, but a guide for how to reimagine them, and explore ways towards new political horizons and ultimately ‘the possibility of real happiness’.” Aurelien Mondon, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of Bath, UK

This paper addresses questions of friendship and political community by investigating a particular complex case, comradeship in the life of the soldier. Close attention to soldiers’ accounts of their own lives, successes and failures shows that the relationship of friendship to comradeship, and of both to the success of the soldier’s individual and communal life, is complex and tense. I focus on autobiographical accounts of basic training in order to describe, and to explore the tensions between, two positions: (1) Becoming a soldier is a corrupting loss of individuality and moral sensitivity, and friendship is resistance to it. (2) Becoming a soldier is one form of flourishing, and comradeship—the soldier’s distinctive form of friendship—is one of its constitutive virtues. I draw particularly on George Orwell’s account of basic training and fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and on Tim O’Brien’s account of basic training and fighting in Vietnam.

As Eric Blair, the young George Orwell served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1929, a time of growing Burmese discontent with British rule. He wrote about Burma in a novel, Burmese Days, and a number of non-fictional writings. This article considers the nature of the law-and-order regime Orwell served in Burma, especially in the light of racial self-interest and Britain's commitment to the principle of the rule of law, and traces the issues of race and the law to his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“Anthony Burgess and Science Fiction”, Jim Clarke, SFRA Review 313, Summer 2015, pp. 28-35. Anthony Burgess was a reluctant writer of SF, but a highly influential one. This article, for the SFRA Review, introduces the author and his SF work and seeks to explain the reason behind his sudden reversal of attitude towards SF in mid-career.

Any consideration of Animal Farm must start from the fact that the text is a fairy story. The feature of fable, defined by a millennial tradition, allows Orwell to write a work in which moral, social and political meaning transcends the historical events allegorically referred to, the Russian Revolution and its outcomes in Stalinism, to put itself in universal terms.
In this sense, Animal Farm can be read in the key of sociology and political philosophy by referring to Walter Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence, 1921). In this essay Benjamin argues that the social order, and the legal order it expresses, is affirmed and preserved through violence. In the words of Benjamin, to the revolutionary moment, representing what he calls “divine violence”, follows the “mythical violence”: a connection between the “lawmaking” / “law-preserving” violence and the establishment of “the State power”.
This logical-dialectical oscillation is exemplified in Animal Farm. At the promise of a happy society for the animals liberated, with the uprising against the master, follows the slow and unstoppable establishment of a dictatorship of some of them, the pigs, on all the others.
The decisive point in this process is the writing of the 7 commandments: the fundamental rules of the new social order that represent the Law as the guarantor of the order itself and the source of the social memory. Even before the use of repressive violence, represented by dogs at their service, pigs employ a subtle violence by intervening on the commandments and modifying the contents to their advantage. The manipulation of the legal sphere coincides with the manipulation of social memory.
Animal Farm is, in this perspective, a complex allegory of social order developed on multiple levels. It is a fairy tale in the sense of Phaedrus: a “slave’s tale”, we could say: a story written by the losers of History. It is a narrative representation of the “force of law” in Derrida's sense: “a performative and therefore interpretative violence” affirmed through writing and related to the “mystical foundation of authority”. And, lastly, it is a bitter apologue on the distance that always separates Justice from Law and the consideration of Law as an instrument of power, domination and oppression.

George Orwell’s 1984 is a work that has embedded itself into the cultural ethos since the time of its publication. The dystopia he presents is nightmarish, but the true nightmare vision of his work is the process by which this world where five means four and freedom means enslavement comes to exist. Many perspectives have been offered on Orwell’s masterpiece, and many critics have lauded their particular positions. Two of the most fruitful avenues of investigation for 1984 are Marxist and psychoanalytical criticism. Both theories offer a unique yet complimentary position on the use and effect of language on the individual and the whole. Through the lenses of psychoanalytic and Marxist theories, George Orwell’s 1984 exemplifies a totalitarian dystopia in order to display the effect of the use and abuse of language upon the human experience.

A fresh presentation of some of the twentieth century’s best philosophers, who offer a pessimistic view of human existence: Cioran, Orwell, Levi, Améry, Heidegger, Sartre, Maslow, Barnes and Weil. The author presents their views in opposition to the childish and unjustified optimism of self-improvement books, which “take for granted that we are destined to hapiness”. The author offers, likewise, tons of surprising references to pop culture as an example and support of his points.

A propósito da efeméride (o escritor morreu a 21 de Janeiro de 1950) aproveito para lembrar este conjunto de ensaios de George Orwell, "Inside the Whale and Other Essays" (Penguin Books, 1962 [1957), escritos nos anos 30-40 de XX. Tem textos deliciosos, entre outros "Inside the Whale" onde mergulha nas três primeiras décadas de XX da literatura anglófona, centrado no "Trópico de Câncer" de Miller -o qual não só qualifica de excelente mas, acima de tudo, como exemplar da atitude da época, um "Jonismo", um deixar-se refugiar para o interior da baleia (ainda que Jonas tivesse sido engolido por um peixe, lembra Orwell), submergindo-se na /submetendo-se à realidade.

“Ik vertrouw erop dat de overheid eindelijk ophoudt zich te gedragen als het lelijke meisje dat de spiegel stukslaat, in de overtuiging dat haar spiegelbeeld de schuld is”, aldus Václav Havel in Poging om in de waarheid te leven – Charta ‘77.

Many studies have investigated the notion of utopia in history, philosophy and literature. However, little attention has been devoted to its negative counterpart. Dystopia is the “utopia’s twentieth-century doppelgänger” (Gordin et al., 2010:1). This essay claims the deconstruction of traditional opposites by using Dystopology. This multifocal literary theory expands the dystopian analysis to other genres. Additionally, this paper will provide a dystopological overview of literature to better understand the pure dystopias of the era of social deception, conceiving not only the genesis of a new literature, but also another way of perceiving reality, through comics, cinema and other arts. The new millennium secured the fears of the dystopian trilogy ‒Huxley, Orwell and Bradbury. Therefore, when dystopia turns into reality, the only solution for contemporary authors is apocalypse. Following anarchic ideals, the coming generations see the destruction of society as the only opportunity for humanity to be reborn again.

M. Weber, « Rendre le visible invisible », Kairos 48, février/mars 2021, p. 16.

Toute addiction est, par définition, problématique : il s'agit d'une consommation dont on ne peut se passer malgré les nuisances qu'elle entraîne. Certaines assuétudes sont bien sûr plus onéreuses, nébuleuses, insidieuses et pernicieuses que d'autres. Les écrans dont il est question ici sont multifonctions ; chronophages, ils sont aussi ubiquistes (présents partout), contribuant à estomper la différence entre les mondes public et privé. Ils possèderaient toutefois les vertus de leurs vices, c'est-à-dire d'être des outils d'émancipation, de communication, et de culture. L'écran serait le poème moderne. Invoquer le sens commun permet pourtant certains courts-circuits interprétationnels tendant à prouver le contraire. Remarquons, pour commencer, que le premier sens d'écran est celui de protection et d'obstacle (XIVe). Il s'agit d'une sorte de meuble dont on se sert pour se garantir de l'action directe du feu (Littré 1882, cf. Le Robert 1979). L'écran empêche ainsi, à la fois, de se blesser et de voir. Ce n'est qu'au XIXe siècle qu'il vient à nommer une surface de projection (1864), jusqu'à devenir, cent ans plus tard, le « petit écran ». L'écran (dé)voile alors ce qu'il veut bien montrer et ne blesse que le spectateur non averti des dangers qu'il représente. Cette ambiguïté constitutive-voiler et dévoiler-se décline en trois temps : atomisme, conformisme, et autisme. L'écran est tout d'abord atomisateur de la société, c'est-à-dire qu'il est producteur de dissociété 2. C'est un outil d'isolement (on dit maintenant de confinement) qui empêche la communication en personne, voire la dissuade.

Totalitarianism. Autocracy. Oppression. These words express some of the bedrock points of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and while unquestionably substantial, such concepts are perhaps not meant to elicit responses of joy or even amusement from the novel's intended audience. However, Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth succeeds in presenting the "life" of Orwell's infamously aggrieving text in a fashion that captivates and gratifies.

EDITION 21-1 Farm der Tiere : ein Märchen / George Orwell. Mit einem Essay "Die Pressefreiheit" ("The freedom of the press") und einem Vorwort zur ukrainischen Ausgabe 1947. Aus dem Englischen übers. von Ulrich Blumenbach. Nachwort von Eva Menasse.-München : Manesse-Verlag, 2021.-187 S. ; 22 cm.-Einheits-sacht.: Animal farm <dt.>.-ISBN 978-3-7175-2518-9 : EUR 18.00 [#7270] Neben dem berühmten anti-utopischen Roman 1984 1 ist das wohl bekann-teste Buch George Orwells (1903-1950) die Erzählung Farm der Tiere, die früher regelmäßig Schullektüre war und eine gute Vorlage für die Diskussion grundlegender politisch-gesellschaftlicher Fragen darstellte. 2 Es war zu erwarten gewesen, daß nach dem Ende des Copyrights auf die zu Lebzeiten erschienenen Bücher von Orwell, der eigentlich Eric Arthur Blair hieß, neue Ausgaben und Übersetzungen erscheinen würden. Daß es allerdings so viele Konkurrenzausgaben sein würden, wie sie jetzt vorliegen, 1 Siehe z. B. die folgenden Neuübersetzungen 1984 / George Orwell. Aus dem Englischen übers. von Gisbert Haefs. Nachwort von Mirko Bonné.-München : Manesse-Verlag, 2021.-442 S. ; 22 cm.-Einheitssacht.: 1984 <dt.>.-ISBN 978-3-7175-2518-9 : EUR 22.00 [#7269].-1984 : Roman / George Orwell. Aus dem Englischen neu übers., mit einem Nachwort, Anmerkungen und einer Zeittafel von Lutz-W. Wolff. Mit einem Vorwort von Robert Habeck.-Neuübersetzung.-Mün-chen : dtv, 2021.-414 S. ; 21 cm.-Einheitssacht.: Nineteen eighty-four <dt.>.-ISBN 978-3-423-28232-1 : EUR 24.00 [#7312].-Rezensionen beider Titel in IFB sind vorgesehen. 2 Eine weitere neue Übersetzung ist Farm der Tiere : ein Märchen / George Or-well. Aus dem Englischen neu übers., mit einem Nachwort, Anmerkungen und ei-ner Zeittafel von Lutz-W. Wolff. Mit einem Vorwort von Ilija Trojanow.-Neuüber-setzung.-München : dtv, 2021.-191 S. ; 21 cm.-Einheitssacht.: Animal farm <dt.>.-ISBN 978-3-423-28266-6 : EUR 20.00 [#7313].-Rez.: IFB 21-1

W artykule omówiono wczesne związki George’a Orwella z Polską i Polakami, starając się zebrać różne perspektywy, konteksty i niekiedy mniej znane fakty. Z jednej strony skupiono się na podkreśleniu znacznego zainteresowania autora Polską oraz przybliżeniu jego stosunku do wybranych polskich zagadnień wyrażanego w publicystyce, którą czasem przysłaniają polskiemu czytelnikowi jego głośniejsze publikacje książkowe. Starano się również przedstawić jego osobiste związki z polską emigracją i zaangażowanie w jej problemy. Z drugiej strony zasygnalizowany został wizerunek Orwella wśród współczesnych mu Polaków oraz zarys jego wczesnej polskiej recepcji, zarówno z perspektywy emigracyjnej, jak i krajowej (oficjalnej), a także ich splotów.

On this work, the state control of both novels, 1984 written by George Orwell and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, will be analyzed. The main focus of the work will be on how the characters are controlled, how a state can control its citizens in a way to change their nature and how a revolution is something that appears to be inconceivable for the oppressed citizens.

It occurs very often to observe the exploitation of common people by the politicians owing to leader’s bad use of absolute power and the silence of the people. It appears that knowledge and education will lead to absolute power which culminates in suffering and oppression of simple and naive people in the Soviet Union. The language used in Animal Farm was not known by the majority and this leads to threat through different principles and laws. This enabled the leaders to exploit the others for their greedy desires and to do abnormal actions. As a result of the use of a vague language and the implementation of fear tactics then creating laws to help them to manipulate others, they could convince them and then they invented lies at the interest of leaders. Yet the others due to their simplicities were easily convinced, while power could be used to serve the entire population of the Soviet Union. The study uses historical approach for the analysis of the research.