Critical Interpretations 1984

Deutscher

‘Not only with Stalinism but with every form and shade of socialism’

Orwell’s purpose, totalitarian regimes

Hitchens

(Significance of women in Orwell’s work)

‘Men in Orwell’s fiction are utterly incapable of happiness without women’

Women, rebellion, human nature

Link to THT - commander wanting offred to play scrabble

Warburg

‘This is amongst the most terrifying books I’ve ever read’

Hopkinson

‘Orwell had imagined nothing new’

Link to THT - Atwood saying that her book shows nothing new

Crick

(1984) ‘Is a warning, not a prophecy, a cry of ‘danger’ not ‘despair’’

Weiss

‘Those who see Winston as a victim rather than a complicit participant in Oceania’s totalitarian forget the delight he takes in his job’

Lockhurst

(Significance of sex as a rebellion) ‘It explores the resistant potential of desire and sexuality’

Temptation in THT

Topham

‘Language is degraded to such a state that it only serves the government’

Bossche

‘In Winston’s struggle for emancipation he stands alone’

Wadel

Calls Orwell a ‘fiction’

Lynskey

• ‘1984 remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, language is distorted, power is abused, and we want to know how bad things can get.’

• ‘continues to define our nightmares’

Burgess

1984 is ‘an apocalyptic codex of our worst fears’

Warburg - Rorty = both talk about Orwell’s success

he observed that 1984’s success is extraordinary ‘for a novel that is not designed to please nor all that easy to understand’. - W

‘Orwell was successful because he wrote exactly the right books at exactly the right time’ - R