1984 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.

This essay brings together George Orwell’s great novel and a theory of writing as humankind’s master-technology. I approach writing through a non-poststructuralist (and so, an uncommon) lens, as it has come down from the works of, for instance, Walter Ong and Jack Goody. On this theoretical foundation I build an argument for writing, in its technological sense, as the true dystopian technology of Oceania. I show how the underlying conflict in Orwell’s novel is a dystopian version of the ancient conflict between orality and the disembodiment of speech in writing. In the end it is only when speech has been entirely replaced by writing that the totalitarian state prevails absolutely. It turns out that, not the most modern, but the most ancient technology presents the ultimate threat to humankind

¿Qué características son inherentes al totalitarismo? Esta pregunta fue expuesta tanto por Hannah Arendt como por George Orwell, y ambos respondieron a su manera muy particular. Este texto busca alinear las visiones de estos dos escritores para comprender mejor a los totalitarismos, tomando como base a la novela 1984, y
aplicando algunos conceptos teóricos tanto de Arendt, como de Juan Linz y Robert Dahl.

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.

Many have pondered with a tinge of sadness on the ephemerality of existence. A man may die, civilizations prosper and decline, but ideas endure without death. They are trampled upon for a time, “yet seldom do they fail of their seed, and that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times unlooked-for” (Tolkien, 294). The power of idea is seen throughout media and literature. Both 1984, a dystopian novel written by George Orwell, and the film V for Vendetta portray a world besieged by poverty, warfare, and totalitarianism. Amongst the turmoil and destruction, V emerges victorious while Winston Smith succumbs to the Oceanian hegemony. Both V and the Party of 1984 succeed - V in the ousting of the government while the latter in its attainment - because they realize that the power of a political or moral belief can transcend that of the individual. V and Big Brother transform into symbols, or embodiments of ideas, through which they propagate their influence. Moreover, they realize that a belief can cause an individual to be audacious to the point of irrationality. Finally, V and the Party are both aware that an idea is more powerful as a collective quality.

The Flammarion engraving is a nineteenth century depiction of the sky as a dome where a traveller goes to the edge of the world puts his head through to see the greater universe outside. The safe, comforting world of a static blue vault of fixed stars gives way to a modern dynamic view that the earth is moving in space. It is interesting that it is a traveller that is depicted, the type of person who goes beyond local boundaries of mental and physical limitations to achieve understanding.

This research article aims to portray and mirror the political symbolism and its significance in George Orwell's
writings with reference to “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty Four”. It is an attempt to depict the political symbolism
of Orwell’s writings in the abovementioned novels, his message, legitimate fears and warning for future generations
against the scandals of totalitarianism and finally to uncover the distortion of power when spoiled by ill-mannered
politicians as symbolized by room 101 in “1984” and manifested in the seven commandments prescribed by old major and
later amended by Napoleon. In their pursuit to achieve the main objectives of this article, the researchers utilized a blend
of approaches to find out clear-cut, evident and tangible justifications beyond Orwell’s use of “political symbolism” in
both novels. That is, by virtue of adopting the analytical and critical discourse analysis methodologies along with the
novels’ books of “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Ninety Four” as the primary source of data and collected reviews offered
by other writers as the secondary source of data; it could be concluded that for Orwell the political symbolism was not
only a sword and shield for protection against totalitarian regimes but also was a platform for liberty and freedom of
expression when democracy is completely absorbed by such dictators and totalitarian governments.

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.

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.

Following Derrida, Orwell has represented in his novel what the philosopher called mal d’archive: the presence in the individual and in society of two opposite tendencies. On the one hand there is the Freudian death drive, the movement towards the destruction and oblivion; on the other, the “archive drive”, the tendency to preserve the past events and experiences in the form of conscious memory and historical documents. The archive is thus the “place” of an impossible desire: to preserve forever something that is radically exposed to end.
Winston Smith works in the “Records Department” and his job, that he doesn’t seem to dislike too much, consists properly in the repression of the past by modification of documents and their destruction. This death drive is opposed by his declared intention and tentative to regain the personal and collective past by the act of remembering, searching memories among the proletarians, writing a diary as a proof, and so on. All of his attempts are doomed to fail not only for the system of control and brutal violence exerted by the Party, but mainly for the unbearable contradiction of his attitude towards the archive.
However, Smith seems to duplicate the very logic of the Party’s ideology: the totalitarian order articulates, on a larger scale, a contradictory process of censorship and rewriting of the past, along with the control of language and minds, in a vision that seeks paradoxically to destroy the archive through its total control and preservation.
The notion of archive, considered in its philosophical and material meaning, that is ontological meaning, thus invites to consider Orwell’s dystopia as a powerful insight into the ideological configuration of every social organization, not only totalitarian, because, questioning the concepts of origin, power and law, concerns the functioning of a society through ideology and subjectification.

För att bättre visa dystopins utveckling ska jag använda exempel från den mest berömda svenska dystopin; Karin Boyes Kallocain och som källa ska jag använda Sarah Ljungquists bok Den litterära utopin och dystopin i Sverige 1734-1940.  Sarah Ljungquist (2001, s.245) säger i sin bok att Kallocain är den svenska utopiska genrens viktigaste verk och den första svenska litterära dystopin. Det är också faktiskt den enda svenska litterära dystopin som har fått internationell spridning.

"Crooked people deceive themselves in order to deceive others; in this way the world comes to ruin." This quote from a medieval Confucianist expresses the ethical danger of self-deception. My paper examines the psychological proclivity for self-deception and argues that it lies behind much social and interpersonal injustice. I review Hitler's Mein Kampf, as a premiere example of such cognitive duplicity, and Socratic dialectic, as an example of the cognitive hygiene necessary to combat it. I conclude that a robust educational program of Socratic-style critical thinking is crucial to the furtherance of a just society.

This study aims to read George Orwell's master piece Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) with the help of Jungian theories. In 1984 Orwell creates a society of rebellious characters, cities in ruin and an oppressive, totalitarian government lead by Big Brother. It is a world in which ignorance is bliss. The writer tries to examine the psychological behavior of each character in the novel. Archetypes and myths or motifs which can be appeared in different genres and different times, but certainly have the same psychological response and cultural function. Jung, the great, believed libido (psychic energy) to be more psychic than sexual; also, he considered Freudian theories too negative because of the latter‗s emphasis on the neurotic rather the healthy aspects of the psyche. Jung's primary contribution to this theory, was to develop the concept of personal unconscious and asserted that beneath this is a primeval, collective unconscious shared in the psychic inheritance of all members of the human family. Through the exact examination of the novel Nineteen Eighty Four we are going to see that even for realities, governments can change reality by Double Thinking. In fact Double Thinking means changing the reality to man-made reality, therefore this novel is a prominent example of literary works which casts off the usage of psychological ways by governments to suppress the people. Within the story Orwell reflects the Jungian archetypes which are dominant through the novel. For instance, as the novel opens, Winston (the main character) feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party which prohibits free thought, sex and any expression of individuality. So Winston shows the Persona which Jung calls the social mask. Therefore the writer of this thesis tries to show the Jungian approaches as used by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

« Aldous Huxley and George Orwell on the political use of technoscience », Cosmos and History, Vol 15, No 1, « Regaining Sanity », 2019, pp. 165-181.


The main bone of contention between A. Huxley and G. Orwell is easy to identify : could or should political power be benevolent. In order to provide a sound answer, three steps are expedient. First, the political contrast drawing a sharp line between Huxley and Orwell is specified. Second, this contrast is shown to be correlated with Huxley's technophilia, as it is the heir of La Boétie and Tocqueville, and with Orwell's technophobia, mainly summoned by the harsh reality of fascist totalitarianism. Third, we evoke the limited way in which Huxley can be said to have changed, in the sixties, his understanding of the relevance of his own dystopia.

A robust novel in terms of narrative structure, plot, themes and writing style, 1984 was chosen by TIME magazine in 2005 as one of the 100 best English language novels from 1923 to 2005. Retrospectively, TIME's November 23, 1983 issue ran the title heading 'Big Brother's Father' featured with a charcoal colour sketch of George Orwell's mugshot looking towards the ominous one eye. Early January of 2017, Orwell's 1984 shot up to the position of Amazon's best seller. It indicated a sceptical, apprehensive yet an inquisitive readership that was bowled over to discover the astounding modern-day relevance the book displayed. Declared as a 2017 must-read by the New York Times, authoritative scholarship and research regarding 1984 has been abundant.Yet, the novel continues to enthral, stimulate and puzzle. However, at the heart of the novel is a blossoming love story that is often overlooked if not side lined. Firstly, this paper analyses the features of a post-modern world in 1984 manufactured under the patronage of oligarchical capitalismthatleads to the dismantling of regular human interactions. Secondly, it dissects the protagonist, Winston Smith's loss of family and sense of belonging. Thirdly, it highlights the elements of a romance in1984.

The initial title of Orwell's *Nineteen Eighty-Four* was *The Last Man in Europe* which was changed to its present one by chance and circumstances, especially on its publisher’s suggestion. That title indicates what the author wanted to warn the world againt. After its publication, both leftist and rightist opinion used this novel as a weapon to attack each other. This paper tries to examine the warning that Orwell presents in this novel by drawing a hellish world to show that any kind of totalitarian regime is inhuman in nature and forces its subjects to utter humiliation, defeat and total submission of self, and that if the world continues to run in its present way, such a world is very likely.

Quelle est la nature du travail ? Oui ou non est‐il le propre du phénomène humain ? Offre‐t‐il vraiment un sens à notre existence terrestre, voire à ce qui pourrait lui faire suite ? Seule une approche anthropologique articulant les éléments historiques et critiques appropriés permet de comprendre son rôle actuel, son histoire, et son futur. Une telle visée (certains parleraient de hauteur de vue) dévoile instantanément les enjeux et dessine l'horizon de l'action politique au XXI e siècle. Si cette visée était cultivée citoyennement, elle indiquerait comment et pourquoi créer les situations qui s'imposent pour tenir grand compte des nouvelles réalités de la guerre des classes. Lorsque Winston Churchill promet à ses concitoyens « du sang, du labeur, des larmes et de la sueur 2 », il ignore probablement qu'au même moment le gouvernement nazi prétend pour sa part que « le travail rend libre 3 ». Son ton oraculaire, quasiment biblique, donne à penser que la condition humaine ne peut s'envisager en dehors des catégories de châtiment et de pénitence. Nous allons le voir, il y a toujours une théologie du travail à l'oeuvre dans les errances historiques de l'homo sapiens. Afin de simplifier la discussion, il était inévitable de se concentrer sur une histoire et il était expédient de penser l'histoire européenne. Bien que cette double réduction apparaisse de plus en plus inacceptable aux chercheurs avertis de la richesse des cultures, elle est tout à fait expédiente dans le cadre d'une enquête portant sur les liens incestueux existant entre technique, technoscience, aliénation et impérialisme. 2 « I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. » (Winston Churchill, lors de son premier discours devant la Chambre des communes en tant que Premier ministre du Royaume‐Uni, le 13 mai 1940 ; voir http://www.winstonchurchill.org.) 3 Le bon mot « Arbeit macht frei » fut affiché à l'entrée de nombreux camps de concentration en juin 1940, à l'instigation du Général SS Theodor Eicke.

Distopya yazını, geleceğe dair sunduğu karamsar bakış ile yaratıldığı dönemdeki kaygılara ışık tutan bir türdür. Bu türün en bilinen örneklerinden biri olan Bin Dokuz Yüz Seksen Dört ise kurguladığı karamsar dünyada yaşayan bireyleri devletin mutlak kontrolü altında betimlemektedir.
Eserin başkişisi Winston Smith ise bu dünyayı ayakta tutan bir düzenin parçasıdır ve roman Smith’in özgürleşme çabasını
derin ruhsal analizler ile okuyucuya aktarır.
George Orwell’inBin Dokuz Yüz Seksen Dört romanının eksen olarak alındığı bu çalışmada, distopya yazının, bir aydın olarak
yazarın sessiz çığlığını içeren bir politik söylem kanalı olabileceği fikri irdelenmektedir.

With its pessimist insights for the future dystopia fiction is a genre that sheds light upon the concerns of the era in which it
was created. One of the well-known examples of this genre, the Nineteen Eighty – Four depicts individuals under total control of the state
in the pessimist world that it created.
The protagonist Winston Smith is a part of the mechanism that sustains this order and the novel narrates Smith’s struggle for
freedom with deep psychological analysis
In this study, which takes George Orwell’s novelNineteen Eighty – Four to the main axis, the idea that the dystopia fiction
might very well be a medium for political discourse that conveys the silent outcry of the writer as an intellectual is discussed.

Diktatör liderlerin toplumundaki her bireyin hareketlerini, duygularını ve hatta düşüncelerini kontrol etme eğilimlerini irdeler. Bir ülkenin hem siyasi hem askeri gücünü tekelinde bulunduranların, bu rejimi sürdürmek ve korumak adına, kaçınılmaz olarak tek-tip bir yaşam düzeni kurması romanın ana temasıyken, bu düzeni kurmak için meşrulaştırılan cinayetler planlanması ve uygulanması sürekli bir tutuklanma korkusuyla vatandaşların baskı ve denetim altında tutulması eleştirilerin odağında yer alır.

This research paper concentrates on George Orwell's novel 1984, published in 1949. The novel explicates the ugly lifestyle of citizens under the rule of a powerful totalitarian ruler Big Brother. Being a ruler, the Big Brother has ultimate political power, and that is, in the narrative, linguistically asserted. This research paper examines how such political and social power of a character/person is imposed in the linguistic territory of a narrative in the light of Critical Discourse Analysis. Critical Discourse Analysis evaluates how the social and political agency of any person in any given discourse works in the linguistic form, theorists like Anthony Giddens elaborate on the role of agency in shaping the social structure. For the purpose of examining the agency in the narrative, with a particular focus on agency-patient role relation, this research brings in the role relations as the trope and, thus, concludes that totalitarian rulers drain out the agency of the citizens even in linguistic form, along with socio-political agency.

A guide for undergraduate introductory study of Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, giving basic information on the characters, setting, and satiric targets of the novel and historicizing it with extracts from Richard D. Erlich's conference papers "Coming of Age in Dystopia: Consciousness and Barriers to Consciousness
in Some Twentieth-Century Anti-Utopias—and Other SF" and "Orwell's Nightmare: Terror and Technology."

This book is the result of the Lecture Notes produced for the class ‘Introduction to Interlinguistics’ held at the University of Amsterdam during my first mandate as Special Chair holder there (2014-2019). This means that the intended readers are my students, who may come from the Humanities, such as English Studies or Philosophy, as well as from more formally oriented curricula, such as Logic or Artificial Intelligence.

Although the primary focus of George Orwell’s 1984 is not the investigation of the supernatural, it has several religious analogies that are worth exploring. The novelist managed to create a dystopian world in which the secular meets the sacred, that is, the ruling force of the imaginary Oceania is represented with divine features. This power is challenged by the protagonist, Winston Smith, whose personal preferences clearly come across as heresy against the Party.

Dystopian literature is considered a branch of science fiction which writers use to portray a futuristic dark vision of the world, generally dominated by technology and a totalitarian ruling government that makes use of whatever means it finds necessary to exert a complete control over its citizens. George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is considered a landmark of the dystopian genre: it portrays a futuristic where a totalitarian, fascist party rules London aiming to keep its citizens under their complete control. This paper will take two examples of contemporary dystopian literature, Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” (1967) and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982-1985), in order to closely analyze the influence that Orwell’s dystopia played in their construction. It will focus on how these two works took Orwellian vision of a totalitarian state, the different methods of control it employs to keep citizens under complete control and submission, and how they introduce them into their stories.

KEYWORDS: Orwell, V for Vendetta, Faith of Our Fathers, social control, manipulation, submission.



La ciencia ficción es uno de los géneros cuye auge se encuentra al alza hoy en día. De entre sus diversas ramificaciones, la literatura distópica es una de las más usadas por los escritores para proyectar una visión del mundo oscura y futurista, dominado por la tecnología y caracterizada por un gobierno totalitario que hace uso de todos los medios que encuentra necesarios para ejercer un control total sobre sus ciudadanos. La novela de George Orwell 1984 (1949) es considerada un hito del género distópico: en ella, Orwell retrata un Londres futurista, gobernado por un partido fascista y totalitario, cuyo mero objetivo es el control total sobre sus ciudadanos. El objetivo de este ensayo es analizar dos ejemplos de la literatura distópica contemporánea, por un lado "La Fe de Nuestros Padres" (1967) de Philip K. Dick, así como la novela gráfica de Alan Moore  V de Vendetta (1982-1985), con el objetivo de estudiar la influencia que el modelo distópico de Orwell desempeñó en la construcción de las distopías anteriormente mencionadas. De igual modo, este ensayo se centrará en cómo estas dos obras tomaron las representaciones de Orwell de un estado totalitario, los diferentes métodos de control que éste emplea para mantener a sus ciudadanos bajo un estado de absoluta sumisión y control, y cómo plasmaron éstas representaciones en sus respectivas obras.

PALABRAS CLAVE: Orwell, V de Vendetta, La Fe de Nuestros Padres, control social, manipulación, sometimiento.

This research paper aims to analyze George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) using stylistic tools in order to reveal the author’s literary aims in creating its dystopian ambiance, namely its sense of hopelessness and disturbance. What readers of literature feel in response to a text is usually reliant on the language and its crafting by the author. Lexis and syntactic devices are two areas that will be investigated as having been  manipulated by Orwell in order to achieve his literary aim. Lexical items which include nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other elements convey negativity and despondence, while the vocabulary of Newspeak is a special creation that contributes to the sense of disturbance in this fictional world. The syntactic devices of negation, modals, and linking verbs  also serve to reinforce the sensation of helplessness and simultaneous dystopian force within the novel.