short presentation on 1984 for dystopia and gender class fall 2016 SFUAD CWL Department

1. 1984
INTO ROOM 101 WE GO

2. Fight the Power
“Every line of serious work that I have
written since 1936 has been written
directly or indirectly against
totalitarianism and for democratic
socialism, as I understand it.” —George
Orwell, ”Why I Write”

3. Orwell
 1903-1950
 Journalist and author (Animal Farm, 1984)
 Born in India, educated in England (and weirdly
Huxley was his French teacher at Eton)
 Actual name is Eric Arthur Blair, changed it to George
Orwell when he became a writer in the late 1920s
 By the 30s, considered himself a socialist/ anti-
Stalinist
 Married twice, adopted a son
 Died of TB

4. 1984
 Written in 1948, published in 1949
 Has been called the most influential novel of
the 20th century
 Historical context: written in the aftermath of
World War 2
 Obviously, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s
Soviet Union was on Orwell’s mind
 Likely formed in part during his time 12 years
earlier when he was fighting in Spain as a
member of a left-wing, non-Stalinist militia,
the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification
(POUM).
 1984 British film adaption starring John
Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton,
and Cyril Cusack

5. Dear George…
 “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover
that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as
instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for
power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving
their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other
words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to
modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that
which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about
as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course,
there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we
shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.” —letter
from Huxley to Orwell, 1949

6. NY Times, “Little Brother is Watching”
(10/17/2010)
 In George Orwell’s “1984,” that novel of totalitarian politics whose great
mistake was to emphasize the villainy of society’s masters while playing
down the mischief of the masses, the goal of communications technology
was brutal and direct: to ensure the dominance of the state. The sinister
“telescreens” placed in people’s homes spewed propaganda and
conducted surveillance, keeping the population passive and the leadership
firmly in control. In the face of constant monitoring, all people could do
was sterilize their behavior, conceal their thoughts and carry on like model
citizens.

7. Continued…
 This was, it turns out, a quaint scenario, grossly simplistic and deeply
melodramatic. As the Internet proves every day, it isn’t some stern and
monolithic Big Brother that we have to reckon with as we go about our
daily lives, it’s a vast cohort of prankish Little Brothers equipped with
devices that Orwell, writing 60 years ago, never dreamed of and who are
loyal to no organized authority. The invasion of privacy — of others’
privacy but also our own, as we turn our lenses on ourselves in the quest
for attention by any means — has been democratized.
 (ibid)

8. Remains a reference today…this week,
even

9. What are current equivalents to these
1984 concepts?
Telescreen
Big Brother
Ministry of Truth

10. The 1984 Dictionary—in groups, define
from the book and think of current
examples
Orwellian
Newspeak
doublethink
thoughtcrime
memory hole

11. Doublethink
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

12. Newspeak
 “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is
to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever
occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050,
at the very latest, not a single human being will
be alive who could understand such a
conversation as we are having now?... The whole
climate of thought will be different. In fact, there
will be no thought, as we understand it now…” -
Book 1, Chapter 5

13. Newspeak Rules
 The A vocabulary. The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the
business of everyday life — for such things as eating, drinking, working,
putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles,
gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words
that we already possess words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field — but
in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number was
extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All
ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it
could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound
expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite
impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or
philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive
thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.

14. B Words
 The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for
political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political
implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person
using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to
use these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even
into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase
and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal
shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same
time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.
 The B words were in all cases compound words(2). They consisted of two or more words,
or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting
amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take
a single example: the word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, ‘orthodoxy’, or, if one
chose to regard it as a verb, ‘to think in an orthodox manner’. This inflected as follows:
noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present
participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal
noun, goodthinker.

15. And the C words
 The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of
scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use
today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken
to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed
the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very
few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political
speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed
in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a
smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words
were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function
of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its
particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Science’, any meaning that
it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.

16. Sexuality in 1984
 “When you make love you’re using up energy;
and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give
a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to
feel like that. They want you to be bursting
with energy all the time. All this marching up
and down and cheering and waving flags is
simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside
yourself, why should you get excited about
Big Brother…” —Julia, Part 2, Chapter 3

17. Dystopic Parameters
 A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the
citizens of the society.
 Citizens are perceived to be under constant
surveillance.
 Citizens live in a “dehumanized” state.
 Conformity among citizens and assumption that
individuality and dissent are bad.
 An illusion of a perfect utopia
 —Read, Write, Think.org

18. Power Structures
 As fiction is standardly predicated on conflict (people vs. people/ people
vs. environment/ people vs. technology
 Dystopia heightens those conflicts into power struggles of the individual
versus a power structure of some sort
 Classic dystopias such as Brave New World and 1984 have been critiqued
by feminist literary theorists for the inherent patriarchal concerns about
power and the acceptance of learned male-domination/violation as a
human norm (Daphne Patai, Orwell Mystique)
 If we view 1984 through a feminist lens, what are some of the problems
with the depiction of Julia and her relationship with Winston?

19. Return to Atwood
 “Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life – in
the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different
dystopia, The Handmaid's Tale. By that time I was 44, and I'd learned
enough about real despotisms that I didn't need to rely on Orwell alone.
The majority of dystopias – Orwell's included – have been written by men
and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in
them, they have been either sexless automatons or rebels who've defied
the sex rules of the regime. I wanted to try a dystopia from the female
point of view – the world according to Julia, as it were.”
 —https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/18/my-hero-george-
orwell-atwood#comments

20. About that misogyny…
 “Winston views lust and love to be basically
identical. In what's passed off as some sort of
romantic scene, Winston tells his new girlfriend
Julia that, "I wanted to rape you and then murder
you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought
seriously of smashing your head in with a
cobblestone." And Julia remains vapid
throughout, only ever rebelling against the
government inasmuch as it helps satisfy her own
sexual desires.”
 “Your Favorite Book Sucks,” by Robbie Blair litreactor.com

21. Sexuality
 “When you make love you’re using up energy; and
afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for
anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They
want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All
this marching up and down and cheering and waving
flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside
yourself, why should you get excited about Big
Brother… (Julia Part 2 Chapter V)