George Orwell e analisi delle opere principali, da “Amazing Minds 2”., Appunti di Inglese

Scarica George Orwell e analisi delle opere principali, da “Amazing Minds 2”. e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! GEORGE ORWELL Born Eric Blair in India in 1903, he was the son of a minor colonial official. He belonged to the upper middle class, he studied at Eton, a very important college in England, which only certain people could afford, where he began to develop an independent-minded personality, indifference to accepted values, and professed atheism and socialism -> at first, he believed in the ideas and ideals of marxism and communism, but after he realized that communism could lead to a catastrophe, to a totalitarian regime (animal farm), he knew that even the communist regime wasn’t the answer + he rejected the British empire and the idea of imperialism. He rejected and decided to detach from his own background, his privileged class, and decided to live as a poor -> he started wearing second-hand clothes, living in common-lodging houses and he experienced poverty for almost 2 years because he believed that only through experience he could truthfully recount the poor’s reality. He was both a novelist and a journalist, he reported about the social and living conditions of the poor, of workers, of minors and also about the Spanish Civil War. After his social experiment, he devoted himself to writing full time, publishing his works with the pseudonym of George Orwell (George because it was a common English name and Orwell after the river he loved). In 1936 he moved to Catalonia with his wife to report on the Spanish Civil War + in Barcelona he joined the militia of POUM (workers’ party of Marxist Unification) and fought in the Aragon front. He then died of tuberculosis in 1950. Works Down and Out in Paris and London (non-fiction narrative in which he described his experience among the poor); Burmese Days; The Road to Wigan Pier; Homage to Catalonia; Animal Farm (1945); Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The artist’s development -Rejection of his English background, he saw his Country from the outside, judging its strength and weaknesses; -Conflict between his middle-class and his emotional identification with the working class; -The aim of the artist: the role of the artist is to inform, to reveal facts, and to be independent-> he believed that fiction had to be as clear as ‘a window pane’ = it has to be transparent, without any useless words or descriptions. Social themes Realistic language; Human fraternity and misery caused by poverty; Depravation of society; Criticism of totalitarianism, its tyranny and violation of liberty. ANIMAL FARM Historical background Animal Farm is Orwell’s reaction to: -Stalin’s Purge Trials (1930), which led to the death of 3 million people and the sending of many other people to forced labour camps; -Stalin’s signature of the non-aggression pact with Hitler (1939). The book expresses Orwell’s disappointment of totalitarianisms in the form of an animal fable -> the novel is a parody of workers running farms and factories in the Soviet Union, the animals represent the workers who are exploited by their masters. It’s an anti-utopian book influenced by Swift’s Gulliver’s travels. Plot The story is set on a farm, where a group of oppressed animals, capable of speech and reason, overcome their cruel master and set a revolutionary government, in which the pigs are the supervisors, with Napoleon being their leader. Napoleon’s leadership soon becomes a dictatorial regime, which is based on the Seven Commandments that had been changed and altered-> the commandments based on equality had been abandoned and, after some time, only one of them remained = “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”. The meaning of the book The story is parallel with the history of the URSS between 1917 and 1943. Each animal symbolizes a precise figure or representative type + the book is not only a satire on the Soviet Union, but on dictatorship in general, as the name “Napoleon” shows. Animal Farm shows how the initial idealism of the revolution gradually changed into inequality, hierarchy and dictatorship. The decay of the revolution is always seen from the community’s pov, never from the pigs’. Characters Old Major = a mixture of Marx and Lenin / Farmer Jones = Czar Nicolas II / Snowball = Trotsky-> brilliant speaker and thinker, wanted to improve the welfare of russian citizens, chased away by Lenin’s KGB (secret police), agrees with karl Marx / Squealer = to squeal, to betray, to use the speech and propaganda / Napoleon = Stalin, who uses terror and force in order to assert his power over the animals, didn’t follow Marx’s ideals, cared only for power, killed all who opposed him / Boxer = the loyal, hard-working man (his name derives from the Boxer Rebellion in China / Dogs = metaphor for the Terror State created by Stalin / Pigs = greedy and lazy. Religion Orwell remains conventionally socialist in portraying religion: the raven Moses, who is Mr. Jones’s favorite pet, derives its name from the Hebrew word “lawgiver”. When the revolution turns conservative and nationalistic, Napoleon brings the raven back, as Stalin brought back the Russian Orthodox Church. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR The novel shows an utopian world after an imaginary atomic war where the planet had been divided into three big states, which all live under a totalitarian regime: the state of Oceania (North America, South America and Australia) which is in constant conflict with Eurasia (Europe and Russia) and Eustasia (Japan, China, Tibet and India) + there’s Airstrip One, a future England, which is an outpost of Oceania. Setting The novel is set in London, capital of the state of Oceania, in 1984: London is a desolated and destroyed city governed by terror and constant control of Big Brother. In the novel, the whole world is completely controlled by mass media, technological devices (such as helicopters that surround the city to control what happens inside of every building) and through propaganda + its new language is Newspeak. Oceania’s ranks The state of Oceania is ruled by The Party, which controls citizens through constant supervision, violent policing and psychological torture. The head of The Party is Big Brother. There also are other parties: -Inner Party: it’s made up of 1% of the population -> the people who belong to this party are privileged, they control the country, they can eat more, they can have sex for their own enjoyment (which is forbidden for the others); -Outer Party: it’s made up of 18% of the population -> the outer party is controlled by the inner one, and the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, belongs to this party and will later rebel against the Inner Party; -The Proles: made up by 81% of population, are the labour power who live in poverty -> they’re so poor that they don’t need to be controlled by the Inner Party, they don’t have the strength to rebel against the other superior parties; -The Brotherhood: it’s an underground secret organization led by Emmanuel Goldstein. Its aim is to find other people with whom to rebel against the other parties. There's a moment called two minutes hate: the Two Minutes Hate is a daily, public period during which members of the Outer Party must vent their hatred towards the hologram of Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the Brotherhood and principal enemy of the state (he wasn’t the real enemy, but Big Brother made the people believe otherwise), and then express their love of Big Brother.