George Orwell: A Life of Independent-Mindedness and Social Consciousness, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica George Orwell: A Life of Independent-Mindedness and Social Consciousness e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950) Born Eric Blair in India, he was the son of a minor colonial official. As a small child he was taken to England by his mother, and was educated first at a preparatory school, then at Eton. He could not stand the lack of privacy, the humiliating punishments, the pressure to conform to the values of the English public school tradition (the development of character, a spirit of competition, a rigid adherence to discipline and to the prevailing moral code). At Eton he began to develop an independent-minded personality, indifference to established and accepted values, and started to profess atheism and socialism. After school he joined the Indian Imperial Police: he spent in Burma the years from 1922 to 1927. He left the Police because he was against British imperialism and against “every form of man's dominion over man” (and he meant not only the Burmese, but also the English working class). Back in London he started a social experiment: experiencing poverty by wearing second hand clothes, living in common lodging houses in the East End, seeking the company of social outcasts. This way he learned how institutions for the poor (hostels, prisons, lodging houses, hospitals) worked. After a period in Paris where he worked as a dishwasher in a hotel, he started publishing his works under the pseudonym GEORGE ORWELL: he chose George because it suggested plain speaking and common sense, typically English, and Orwell because it was the name of a river he was fond of. In the years between 1933 and 1937 he wrote non-fiction narratives in which he described his experience ‘among the poor, his experience in the colonial service, and investigated conditions among the miners, factory workers and unemployed in the industrial North. In 1936 he went to Catalonia to report on the Spanish Civil War. He joined the militia of the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) and fought in the war. In “Homage to Catalonia” he remembers this experience as his true conversion to socialism and the ideals of brotherhood and equality. In 1941 he joined the BBC and in 1943 he became editor of “Tribune”, a socialist weekly. He was a complex writer and became an influential voice of the 20° century: he was a novelist, a book reviewer, a critic, a political journalist, a pamphleteer. Relationship with his country and his social class: a. Orwell had a deep understanding of the English character, its tolerance, its dislike of abstract theories and insistence on common sense. On the other hand, thanks to his various experiences abroad, he was able to see his country from the outside and to judge its strengths and weaknesses. His life and works were marked by an unresolved conflict between his middle-class background and education and his emotional identification with the working class. The role of the writer: a. b. In the Twenties writers were concerned with language and form to express a tragic, post-war pessimism; In the Thirties writers valued social purpose and content over form and had left-wing sympathies. According to Orwell writing has an important social function: it has to inform, reveal facts, draw conclusions from them, interpret reality. This explains why his most successful novels deal with political themes (without, however, following a party line, as Orwell thought a writer should be independent) Social themes misery caused by poverty and deprivation; human fraternity, tolerance and justice in human relationships; increasing artificiality of urban civilization; devastating critique of totalitarianism and tyranny, which he viewed as a violation of liberty and rights, both human and civil.