Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1984)

a dystopian novel and "cautionary tale" by British socialist writer George Orwell

• "dystopian" = "bad place"
• cautionary tale = a story with a moral purpose, esp. to warn against bad behavior
  • ex. Aesop's Fables are "cautionary tales"
• Orwell saw the book as a warning

• critics have called it a prophetic (predictive of the future) as well as a warning

we will refer to it as "1948" here

Background

• the book was written a few years after the end of World War II
• and the creation of the United Nations (UN)
  • Orwell had called for the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights"
  • 1984 shows a world in which these rights are violated by a government

Orwell's background

• journalist, novelist and socialist reformer
• became famous with the novel Animal Farm that was a cautionary tale against and analogy of the failures of the Russian communist revolution

Novel's background

• whereas Animal Farm cautioned against totalitarian communism, 1984 also cautions against the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini (Italian fascist)
• the book was in part a response to Aldous Huxley's "A Brave New World"
  • Huxley's dystopia is of a people controlled/ enslaved by drugs and pleasure
  • Orwell's dystopia was violent

Writing of the novel

• completed in 1948, thus the inversion of the year
• Orwell was dying of tuberculosis while he wrote it, and will himself to complete it

Warnings & phrophesies

• excesses and dangers of democracy
• surveillance state
  • whereas Orwell's warning was against state (government) surveillance
  • we have in the West a pervasive corporate surveillance
    • internet and cell phone tracking
    • "personalized" advertising
• propaganda
• cancel culture
• disinformation
• "bread and circuses"

Cultural influence

• "1984"

• Big Brother

• New Speak

• mind control

• Thought Police