The Modern Impacts of George Orwell's 1984

The Modern Impacts of George Orwell's 1984

by Benjamin Secino

The Modern Impacts of George Orwell's 1984

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Abstract

The paragraph should give a three to five sentence abstract about your entire London HUA experience including 1) a summary of the aims of your project, 2) your prior experience with humanities and arts courses and disciplines, and 3) your major takeaways from the experience. This can and should be very similar to the paragraph you use to summarize this milestone on your Profile Page. It should contain your main Objective, so be sure to clearly state a one-sentence statement that summarizes your main objective for this milestone such as "a comparison of the text of Medieval English choral music to that of the Baroque" or it may be a question such as "to what extent did religion influence Christopher Wren's sense of design?"

Introduction

I suggest you save this section for last. Describe the essence of this project. Cover what the project is and who cares in the first two sentences. Then cover what others have done like it, how your project is different. Discuss the extent to which your strategy for completing this project was new to you, or an extension of previous HUA experiences.

As you continue to think about your project milestones, reread the "Goals" narrative on defining project milestones from the HU2900 syllabus. Remember: the idea is to have equip your milestone with a really solid background and then some sort of "thing that you do". You'll need to add in some narrative to describe why you did the "thing that you did", which you'd probably want to do anyway. You can make it easy for your advisors to give you a high grade by ensuring that your project milestone work reflects careful, considerate, and comprehensive thought and effort in terms of your background review, and insightful, cumulative, and methodical approaches toward the creative components of your project milestone deliverables.

PLEASE NOTE: this milestone template has only a few sections as examples, but your actual milestone should have many relevant sections and subsections. Please start to block out and complete those sections asking yourself "who, what, when, where, and why".

Remember, as you move toward your creative deliverable, you're going to want/need a solid background that supports your case, so you want it to paint a clear and thorough picture of what's going on, so that you can easily dissect your creative component and say "This thing I did is rooted in this aspect of my background research".

Section 1: Background

When researching George Orwell, it is almost impossible to avoid the phrase "afterlife." Since his death in 1950, Orwell has been invoked countless times as a "prophet," given authority over everything from politics to the English language. Daphne Patai, author of The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology, is quoted as follows:

I think the question of Orwell's relevance is strictly an empirical one. Is he relevant? Yes, because he is constantly cited.... There is enormous attention being paid to who he is and what he wrote. So I don't think that's a matter of opinion. He simply is relevant.

In exploring this relevance and the justifications behind it, this project will outline the effects that Orwell and his work, specifically Nineteen Eighty-Four, have had on modern politics, the English language, and the cultural idea of dystopia.

The Political Legacy of Nineteen Eighty-Four

I think Orwell is actually more [politically] relevant than ever before. He wasn't talking merely about communism. He wasn't talking merely about fascism. He wasn't talking merely about Stalinism. He was talking about totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset. And I think there's lots of evidence that the totalitarian mindset to varying degrees is still around. Saddam Hussein. North Korea. Even here [in America] it's very difficult to read the pronouncements of John Ashcroft and Homeland Security without having twinges of worry about what people would accept here in terms of social control. You see people being locked up. There's something Orwellian... about seeing people being dropped off in places that aren't officially part of the United States because they're officially part of Cuba, not allowed to see lawyers, not knowing what they're charged with, what their status is.

Ian Williams, United Nations correspondent for the Nation and author of George Bush at the War Front, in a 2003 interview

The above quotation dates to 2003, when a great deal of political debate existed over the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. But Bush was neither the first nor the last politician to be attacked by opponents citing George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been used for decades to argue against large government programs. The Obama administration was criticized over the NSA's surveillance methods in 2013 after Edward Snowden's revelations, forcing Obama to deny claims that the program was "Big Brother... run amok." Soon after the Snowden revelations, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four rose in the United States by 5,771%. Even Michael Shelden, author of Orwell: The Authorized Biography, is quoted as saying that "throwing out such a broad net of surveillance is exactly the kind of threat Orwell feared." Most recently, Nineteen Eighty-Four shot up to become the number-one selling book in the United States after the first week and a half of Donald Trump's presidency. Following Kellyanne Conway's use of the term "alternative facts," sales on Amazon of Nineteen Eighty-Four rocketed by nearly 10,000%.

Orwell's final novel has been used as a weapon for both the political Left and Right. This universality of use presents an interesting irony: When both sides of the political spectrum claim Orwell as their own, it is impossible for both sides to be representing him accurately. This misrepresentation, used to twist public opinion and enliven poppaganda, is, in turn, distinctly Orwellian.

To be fair, some of this universal citation of Orwell comes from discrepancies within Orwell himself. Though a lifelong socialist who considered himself part of the Left in many ways, Orwell was considered too critical of Communism by many of his contemporaries, who would just have soon painted him as one of the Right. After Orwell's death, this debate intensified. During the Vietnam war, many on the Left claimed that Orwell's anti-Imperialist views would have led him to oppose America's involvement in the conflict. At the same time, many on the Right held that Orwell's anti-Communist stance would have led him to support America's involvement.

Section 2: Deliverable

Additional Image

In this section, provide your contribution, creative element, assessment, or observation with regard to your background research. This could be a new derivative work based on previous research, or some parallel to other events. In this section, describe the relationship between your background review and your deliverable; make the connection between the two clear.

Conclusion

In this section, provide a summary or recap of your work, as well as potential areas of further inquiry (for yourself, future students, or other researchers).