Paper no. 107 assignment

Paper no.107 Twentieth century Literature

from:World War 2 to the end of century

Topic: 1984 as a Dystopian Novel

Name:Pandya Mayuri

Roll no.14

Enroll no.4069206420210023

Email id: pandyamayuri0610@gmail.com

Batch:2021 to 2023

Submitted to: S.B.Gardi Department of English MKBU.

Eric Arthur Blair

 (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterized by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.

Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture.

Blair was born in India, and raised and educated in England. After school he became an Imperial policeman in Burma, before returning to Suffolk, England, where he began his writing career as George Orwell—a name inspired by a favorite location, the River Orwell. He lived from occasional pieces of journalism, and also worked as a teacher or bookseller whilst living in London. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, his success as a writer grew and his first books were published. He was wounded fighting in the Spanish Civil War, leading to his first period of ill health on return to England. During the Second World War he worked as a journalist and for the BBC. The publication of Animal Farm led to fame during his life-time. During the final years of his life he worked on 1984, and moved between Jura in Scotland and London

Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime".[3][4] In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Introduction of Novel

Nineteen Eighty-Four (also stylised as 1984) is a dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale written by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the totalitarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated.

The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, ruled by the Party, who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking.Big Brother, the dictatorial leader of Oceania, enjoys an intense cult of personality, manufactured by the party's excessive brainwashing techniques. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker at the Ministry of Truth and Outer Party member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He expresses his dissent by writing in a diary and later enters into a forbidden relationship with his colleague Julia and starts to remember what life was like before the Party came to power.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularised the term "Orwellian" as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "Thought Police", "thoughtcrime", "Newspeak", and "2 + 2 = 5". Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes Time included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005,and it was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, reaching number 13 on the editors' list and number 6 on the readers' list. In 2003, it was listed at number eight on The Big Read survey by the BBC.

 

1984 as a Dystopian Novel

What is Dystopia

Dystopia is utopia's polarized mirror image. While utilizing many of the same concepts as utopia—for example, social stability created by authoritarian regimentation—dystopia reads these ideas pessimistically. Dystopia angrily challenges utopia's fundamental assumption of human perfectibility, arguing that humanity's inherent flaws negate the possibility of constructing perfect societies, except for those that are perfectly hellish. Dystopias are solely fictional, presenting grim, oppressive societies—with the moralistic goal of preventing the horrors they illustrate.

 A single literary work serves as the origin for both utopia and dystopia, the latter by critical examination of the social structures it presents as desirable and good. Thomas More's Utopia (1516) depicts a fictitious country named for Utopus, its first conqueror. Having reshaped a savage land into an ideal society through planning and reason, King Utopus's benevolent reign fulfills Plato's ideal of the philosopher-king expressed in The Republic (c. 400 b.c.e.). Derived from the Greek ou ("not" or "no") and topos (place), a utopia is "no place," a land that does not exist. In addition to its social structure, utopia's pronunciation irresistibly suggests "eutopia" (eu topos ), a "good place" free from civil conflict and social inequality—so a utopia is a good place that does not exist, but which is shown to be possible through social engineering.

By contrast, a dystopia (dis topos ) is a "bad place," deliberately written to frighten the reader; the fact that it, too, is fictitious offers scant comfort, because it is equally possible. More's fictive land has eliminated most class distinctions, but with a concomitant loss of individual freedom and artistic creativity. John Stuart Mill used the term "dystopia" as early as 1868 (Hansard Commons, 12 March) but critics struggled for much of the twentieth century with such unwieldy terminology as "anti-utopia," "utopian satire," "reverse utopias, negative utopias, inverted utopias, regressive utopias, cacoutopias … non-utopias, satiric utopias, and … nasty utopias" (Lewis, p. 27), to say nothing of "George Knox's 'sour utopias in the apocalyptic mode' and George Woodcock's 'negative quasi-Utopias'" (Aldridge, p. 5). Given this confusing proliferation of generic labels, J. Max Patrick may be forgiven for believing that he created the term dystopia in 1952 as the appropriate categorization for Joseph Hall's 1605 Mundus Alter et Idem (Negley and Patrick, p. 298). Patrick unquestionably picked the winner, and dystopia has eclipsed these other labels as the term of choice for a burgeoning literary genre. As dystopian fiction has become more widespread and popular since the end of World War II, critics have grown comfortable in classifying dystopias based on their own generic qualities, rather than explicitly by contrasting them against utopias. The term dystopia has also grown more familiar and is commonly used to refer to any dark or unpleasant future. Finally, by the end of the twentieth century, critics seemed to have abandoned  the effort to segregate dystopia from science fiction, the larger literary 

1984 Dystopian novel

George Orwell’s 1984 is a defining example of dystopian fiction in that 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. Unlike utopian novels, which hold hope for the perfectibility of man and the possibility of a just society, dystopian novels like 1984 imply that the human race will only get worse if man’s lust for power and capacity for cruelty go uncorrected.

In 1984, 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, a 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. In 1984, as Winston works to acquire objects from the past, find spaces without telescreens or microphones in them, and recover memories of the time before the Party, Orwell provides the reader with glimpses of how Winston’s society came to be. We learn about a nuclear war, a revolution, mass famines, and a period of consolidation of power by the Party.

Dystopian novels explore the effects of oppression and totalitarianism on the individual psyche as well as how the individual functions in a repressive society. Winston’s trouble retrieving and trusting his memories illustrates the way the Party has corrupted his emotional life as well as his daily existence, asking the reader to question the nature of memory and individual consciousness. By suggesting that Winston is initially complacent because he can’t remember whether or not life was better and he was happier before the Revolution, the book examines the importance of memory in creating a sense of self.

The first title for this novel was The last man in Europe, but Orwell changed it because Frederic Warburg, publisher, suggested him to do so. It's unknown why he has chosen the title 1984, there is presumption that he might have been switched the numbers( he began writing it in 1948).

The story occurs in London, a province of the state Oceania. Beside Oceania, there are two more totalitarian states that controlled world, Eurasia and Eastasia.

Oceania is a totalitarian state ruled by a group The Party which leader and dictator is Big Brother (resembles Joseph Stalin). Posters of "Big Brother" with the slogan BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU can be found everywhere. Public thought is guided with slogans: War is Piece, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Oceania's citizens are divided into three classes- The Inner Party, The Outer Party, and the Proles, they have no right either to a personal life or to personal thoughts, his memory is quite cancelled, the past is considered as something to forget. The Party monitored the citizens through Ministry of True. The Thought Police has set hidden microphones, telescines in all living quarters and in every public area how they can find and spy thought criminals. Children are also thought to spy their parents and report their suspected thoughts. In the Oceania, there are four ministries: Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Truth and Ministry of Love, in Newspeak : Minipax, Miniplenty, Minitrue and Miniluv. Newspeak is the minimalist artificial language invented by The Party.

The protagonist is Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party, who lives in London and works in the Ministry of Truth. His job is to change historical information, destroy evidence, amend newspaper article and delete people identified as unperson by the Party, all that in order to portray the Party and Big Brother right and correct. He hates the government and he begins writing a diary in which he reveals his anti-government thoughts. The proles, the lowest class in the society who live without police surveillance fascinate him. He becomes friend with the the prole who owns a shop, Mr. Charrington, with whom he talk about the facts and life before the rule of Big Brother. She meets Julia, a worker in another department in the Ministry of Truth, who gives him a paper telling him that she loves him. They secretly begin a romantic relationship, renting the unmonitored room above Mr. Charrington's shop where they can meet and talk about their hopes of freedom.

One day, O' Brien, a member of the Inner Party, approaches Winston and in order to prove his contact with the Brotherhood - opponents of the Party dedicated to fighting Big Brother -gives him a copy of 'The book", a document written by the Emmanuel Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood. While Winston and Julia are reading the book in the rented room, the Thought Police arrive there and arrest them. Then, he realizes that Mr. Charrington is a Thought Police agent. They are taken to the Ministry of Love and separately interrogated there. O'Brien, who is actually a government agent, tortures and brainwashes him to accept and believe in Party doctrine. After his release, he becomes a valid member of society who loves only Big Brother.  (2244 WORDS)

Works Cited

Blair, Eric, et al. “George Orwell.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell. Accessed 7 May 2022.

Orwell, George. “Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - Dystopian Novel Description.” Utopia and Dystopia, http://www.utopiaanddystopia.com/dystopian-literature/nineteen-eighty-four/. Accessed 7 May 2022.

Orwell, George. “1984: Literary Context Essay.” SparkNotes, https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/context/literary/1984-and-the-dystopian-novel/. Accessed 7 May 2022.

Sisk, David. “Dystopia.” Encyclopedia.com, 21 May 2018, https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/literature-english/english-literature-20th-cent-present/dystopia. Accessed 7 May 2022.