On "Nineteen Eighty-Four" : Orwell and Our Future.
Title:
On "Nineteen Eighty-Four" : Orwell and Our Future.
Author:
Gleason, Abbott.
ISBN:
9781400826643
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (273 pages)
Contents:
Cover -- Contents -- Dedicatory Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I: POLITICS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION -- A Defense of Poesy (The Treatise of Julia) -- Doublespeak and the Minority of One -- Of Beasts and Men: Orwell on Beastliness -- Does Literature Work as Social Science? The Case of George Orwell -- PART II: TRUTH, OBJECTIVITY, AND PROPAGANDA -- Puritanism and Power Politics during the Cold War: George Orwell and Historical Objectivity -- Rorty and Orwell on Truth -- From Ingsoc and Newspeak to Amcap, Amerigood, and Marketspeak -- PART III: POLITICAL COERCION -- Mind Control in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Fictional Concepts Become Operational Realities in Jim Jones's Jungle Experiment -- Whom Do You Trust? What Do You Count On? -- PART IV: TECHNOLOGY AND PRIVACY -- Orwell versus Huxley: Economics, Technology, Privacy, and Satire -- On the Internet and the Benign Invasions of Nineteen Eighty-Four -- The Self-Preventing Prophecy -- or, How a Dose of Nightmare Can Help Tame Tomorrow's Perils -- PART V: SEX AND POLITICS -- Sexual Freedom and Political Freedom -- Sex, Law, Power, and Community -- Nineteen Eighty-Four, Catholicism, and the Meaning of Human Sexuality -- CONCLUSION -- The Death of Pity: Orwell and American Political Life -- Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
Abstract:
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is among the most widely read books in the world. For more than 50 years, it has been regarded as a morality tale for the possible future of modern society, a future involving nothing less than extinction of humanity itself. Does Nineteen Eighty-Four remain relevant in our new century? The editors of this book assembled a distinguished group of philosophers, literary specialists, political commentators, historians, and lawyers and asked them to take a wide-ranging and uninhibited look at that question. The editors deliberately avoided Orwell scholars in an effort to call forth a fresh and diverse range of responses to the major work of one of the most durable literary figures among twentieth-century English writers. As Nineteen Eighty-Four protagonist Winston Smith has admirers on the right, in the center, and on the left, the contributors similarly represent a wide range of political, literary, and moral viewpoints. The Cold War that has so often been linked to Orwell's novel ended with more of a whimper than a bang, but most of the issues of concern to him remain alive in some form today: censorship, scientific surveillance, power worship, the autonomy of art, the meaning of democracy, relations between men and women, and many others. The contributors bring a variety of insightful and contemporary perspectives to bear on these questions.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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