George Orwell - Life, poetic and works, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica George Orwell - Life, poetic and works e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! GEORGE ORWELL Born Eric Blair in India in 1903, George Orwell was educated as a scholarship student at prestigious boarding schools in England. Because of his background he never quite fit in, and felt oppressed and outraged by the dictatorial control that the schools he attended exercised over their students’ lives. After graduating from Eton, Orwell decided to work as a British Imperial Policeman in Burma —> He hated his duties in Burma, where he was required to enforce the strict laws of a political regime he despised. His failing health, which troubled him throughout his life, caused him to return to England. Once back in England, he quit the Imperial Police and dedicated himself to becoming a writer. Inspired by Jack London’s 1903 book “The People of the Abyss”, which detailed the author's experience in the slums of London, England, Orwell bought ragged clothes from a second-hand store and went to live among the very poor in London; he then published a book about this experience, entitled “Down and Out in Paris and London”. He later lived among destitute coal miners in northern England, an experience that caused him to give up on capitalism in favor of democratic socialism. After a period in Paris, where he worked as a dishwasher in a hotel, he decided to begin publishing his works with the pseudonym of George Orwell—> he chose 'George' because it had an Englishness about it, suggesting plain speaking, and 'Orwell' because it was the name of a river in the county of Suffolk he was fond of. In December 1936 Orwell went to Catalonia with his wife to report on the Spanish Civil War and, in Barcelona, he joined the militia of the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification). There, he witnessed firsthand the nightmarish atrocities committed by fascist political regimes. In “Homage to Catalonia” (1938) he recalled the experience of the Spanish war as the time of his true conversion to socialism and the ideals of brotherhood and equality. The rise to power of dictators such as Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union inspired Orwell’s mounting hatred of totalitarianism and political authority. At this point of his life, he devoted his energy to writing novels that were politically charged, first with Animal Farm in 1945, then with 1984 in 1949. Orwell had been in declining health for several years by the time 1984 was written and published. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis late in 1947. Nevertheless, he was able to write his enduring novel, which was published to immediate acclaim in June 1949. In October of 1949, Orwell married Sonia Brownell while he was confined to a hospital. His health continued to worsen after his marriage, and he died on January 21, 1950 at the age of 46. • Poetic Orwell had a deep understanding of the English character, of its dislike of abstract theories and insistence on common sense. On the other hand, his various experiences abroad contributed to increase his unusual ability to see his country from the outside and to judge its strengths and weaknesses. Closely linked to this quality was the fact that he chose to reject his background and to establish a separate identity of his own. As a consequence, he was receptive to new ideas and impressions. Orwell's life and works were marked by the unresolved conflict between his middle-class background and education and his emotional identification with the working class. George Orwell wrote because he wanted to change the world. He believed that literature had an important ‘political purpose’ —> as a ‘desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after’. His desire to inform, to reveal facts and draw conclusions from them led him to believe that writing interpreted reality and therefore served a useful social function. This explains why his most successful novels express political themes. —> However, Orwell believed that the writer should be independent and that no good writing could come from following a party line. Orwell was a prolific book-reviewer, critic, political journalist and pamphleteer in the tradition of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Indebted to Charles Dickens in his choice of social themes and the use of realistic and factual language, he conveyed a vision of human fraternity and of the misery caused by poverty and deprivation. He insisted on tolerance, justice and decency in human relationships, and warned against the increasing artificiality of urban civilisation. Above all he strongly criticised totalitarianism, warning against the violation of liberty and helping his readers to recognise tyranny in all its forms. Nineteen Eighty-Four —> published in 1949, it is one of Orwell’s best novels, and it remains one of the most powerful warnings ever issued against the dangers of a totalitarian society. Like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), 1984 is one of the most famous novels of the negative utopian, or dystopian, genre. A dystopia (from Ancient Greek δυσ 'bad', and τόπος 'place'), also called a anti-utopia, is a community or society that is extremely bad or frightening. It is often treated as an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. Unlike a utopian novel, in which the writer aims to portray the perfect human society, a dystopian novel does the exact opposite: it shows the worst human society imaginable, in an effort to convince readers to avoid any path that might lead toward such societal degradation. In 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age and before the television had become a fixture in the family home, Orwell’s vision of a post-atomic dictatorship in which every individual would be monitored ceaselessly by means of the telescreen seemed terrifyingly possible. That Orwell postulated such a society a mere thirty-five years into the future compounded this fear. 1984 remains an important novel as the threats of totalitarianism persist–in part for the alarm Orwell sounds against the abusive nature of authoritarian governments, but even more so for his penetrating analysis of the psychology of power and the ways that manipulations of language and history can be used as mechanisms of control. The novel describes a future world divided into three blocks: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The regimented, oppressive world of Oceania is ruled by the Party, which is led by a figure called Big Brother, and is continuously at war with the other two States. In order to control people's lives, the Party is implementing Newspeak, an invented language with a limited number of words, and threatening them through the Thought Police. Free thought, sex and any expression of individuality are forbidden, but the protagonist, Winston Smith, illegally buys a diary in which he begins to write his thoughts and memories, addressing them to the future generations.