1984 critics Flashcards
Meyers
“He looked backward in time as much as he looked forward.”
Smithers
(bleak world) “he also uses it symbolically…to reflect on the emptiness and lack of meaning in modern 20th century”
Smithers
“dust, a symbol of futility and death”
O’Duffy
“The Party can destroy childhood with its propaganda and indoctrinate emotionless values into the innocent”
Roberts
(everyman archetypes) “root us in reality and give us a flawed figure…to identify with”
Roberts
“protagonist inspires feelings of pity and pathos, not patriotism and pride”
Roberts
(Winston) “is no straightforward martyr”
Bowker
“1984 had been written against death”
Meyers
“Orwell shows that totalitarianism paradoxically intensifies solitude by forcing all the isolated beings into one overpowering system”
Campbell
“women are akin to the proletarian man in Orwell’s work”
Campbell
“sexual filter surrounds all his female personae”
Bail
“women are at the margins”
“exist mainly as a source of frustration, irritation or temptation”
Bell
“a human society stripped to the last shreds of community”
“fear and anxiety the daily staple of life”
Arendt
“under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think”
Lee
“the impossibility of any human relationship”
Crick
“hierarchy destroys fraternity. Orwell’s satire is so consistent that the dictator is actually called Big Brother”
Schellenburg
“this big brother society is too well constructed to break apart in the face of one man’s resistance”
Rissanen
“Winston’s rebellion has been planted in his mind by the Party”
New York Times
“1984 is a work of pure horror”
Pimlott
“In Oceania heroism is empty because there is no one to save”
Howe
“man becomes a mere function of a process”
Pynchon
“the power lies in its ‘unrelenting war on memory desire and language’”
Topham
“language is degraded to such a state that it only serves the government”
Russian 1950s interpretation
“Oceania is present day America. Big Brother and the thought police are the FBI”
Jakubowicz
“Reading in Oldspeak means we’re immersed in the language of the proles and the rebels, and we’re automatically on their side”
Patai
BB “is the perfect embodiment of hypertrophied masculinity”
“never focuses on male power over females”
