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Nineteen Eighty-Four > Critics Quotes > Flashcards

Critics Quotes Flashcards

1
Q

Isaac Deutscher

disillusionment with socialism

A

“Nineteen Eighty-Four… is a document of dark disillusionment, not only with Stalinism, but with every other form and shade of socialism”

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2
Q

Robert Conquest

Orwell and socialism

A

“Orwell in fact seems to have wanted socialism on condition that it would not be run by socialists”

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3
Q

Raymond Williams

political disillusionment

A

“The voice of political disillusion, or the inevitable failure of revolution and of socialism”

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4
Q

Krishnan Kumar

the Soviet myth

A

“It was as a committed socialist that Orwell most felt the need to expose ‘the Soviet myth’”

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5
Q

Isaac Deutscher

pessimism in 1984

A

“[Orwell] increasingly viewed reality through the dark glasses of a quasi-mystical pessimism”

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6
Q

George Woodcock

O’Brien representing all men in power

A

O’Brien is “a caricature, a monstrosity . . .[Orwell] is putting in an extreme and monstrous form the pretensions of all men of power”

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7
Q

Christopher Hitchens

significance of women in Orwell’s work

A

“men in Orwell’s fiction are utterly incapable of happiness without women”

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8
Q

Frederic Warburg, his publisher

the frightening nature of 1984

A

“This is amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read”

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9
Q

George Woodcock

1984 being reflective of the society in which it was written

A

“a satire on the world of 1948”

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10
Q

Julian Symons, a friend of Orwell’s

1984 being familiar to original readers

A

“about a world familiar to anybody who lived in Britain during the war that began in 1939”

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11
Q

Tom Hopkinson

1984 being reflective of the society in which it was written

A

“Orwell has imagined nothing new . . His world of 1984 is the wartime world of 1944 but dirtier and more cruel”

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12
Q

Philip Rahv

1984 being reflective of the society in which it was written and still applying today

A

“If it inspires dread above all, that is precisely because its materials are taken from the real world as we know it”

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13
Q

Bernard Crick

1984 as a warning

A

“[Nineteen Eighty-Four] is a warning, not a prophecy, a cry of ‘danger’, not ‘despair’”

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14
Q

Weiss

Winston being complicit in the regime

A

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

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15
Q

Bossche

the ignorance of the masses

A

“The large mass of common people does not find in themselves the need to think independently, to question or to investigate what they have been taught”

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16
Q

Bossche

Winston being alone in his rebellion

A

“In Winston’s struggle for emancipation he stands alone”

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17
Q

Conheenyl

1984 acts as a warning against apathy and passivneness

A

“It highlights the importance of resisting mass control and oppression”

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18
Q

Lockhurst

the signififance of sex as rebellion

A

“It explores the resistant potential of desire and sexuality”

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19
Q

Topham

destruction of language

A

“Language is degraded to such a state that it only serves the government”

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20
Q

Derry

the power of language

A

“Orwell himself noticed the malleability of human ideals through language”

21
Q

Kika

destruction of family relationships

A

“In 1984, children are essentially used to break up the family unit”

22
Q

Asimov

the three ways of maintaining enternal tyranny

A

Orwell presents three ways of maintaining an eternal tyranny: the immortality of Big Brother, the presence of someone or something to hate, and the rewriting of history

23
Q

Orwell

totalitarianism as a theocracy

A

The “totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy” involving God-like worship of a leader

24
Q

Kristoffer Rissanen

entire lack of free will, the Party has been aware of Winston since the beginning

A

Believes that Winston’s willingness to rebel had been planted in him BY the party the whole time

25
Q

Jean-Claude Michéa

Winston’s defeat

A

“1984 is apparently the story of a failure”

26
Q

Phelan

1984 showing us that totalitarianism is possible, acts as a warning

A

“Orwell’s great achievement…. was to convince us that O’Brien was, indeed, possible”

27
Q

Jem Berkes

power of language

A

“Language becomes a method of mind control with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination”

28
Q

Orwell

truth and reality is what the regime deems it to be

A

“Two and two could make 5 if the Fuhrer wished it”

29
Q

Krishan Kumar

Orwell’s views on language

A

“The perversion and diminution of language was, in Orwell’s eyes, perhaps the most heinous and unforgivable aspect of the contemporary trahison des clercs”

30
Q

Earl Ingersoll

Winston being alone

A

“[Winston’s] radical isolation and his anxiety that no one else shares his ‘humanness’”

31
Q

Earl Ingersoll

sexuality

A

“Big Brother channels it into worship of power”

32
Q

Earl Ingersoll

Winston and Offred

A

“Winston and Offred are both defined through their efforts to affirm a subjective ‘truth’ as a legacy for future generations to whom they look for validation of their noble struggles to survive as humans”

33
Q

Daniel Bell

destruction of community

A

“A human society stripped of the last shreds of community”

34
Q

James Schellenberg

lack of hope

A

“This Big Brother society is too well-constructed to break apart in the face of one man’s resistance”

35
Q

E M Forster

Big Brother as a representation of men in power

A

“Big Brother also lurks behind Churchill and any leader whom propaganda utilises or invents”

36
Q

John Atkins

Winston as weak

A

“He was a weak creature who was born to be victimised”

37
Q

Beatrix Campbell

oppression of women

A

“Women are akin to the proletarian man in Orwell’s work”

38
Q

Kennedy

the argument that sex is not actually rebellious

A

“It is the Party that politicises all private life, and anyone who willingly allows political motives to drive his sexuality is already doing the Party’s work for it”

39
Q

Kennedy

Winston’s rebellion being superficial

A

“Unlike his mother, he was incapable of making a protective gesture for Julia… So we can perhaps regard Winston’s dreams of rebellion against Big Brother as nothing more than a greedy child’s attempts to have more chocolate”

40
Q

Kennedy

lack of hope due to Winston’s weakness

A

“He plots with the inconsistency of a child and because of his inadequacy we are supposed to believe in the strength of the Party”

41
Q

George Orwell

opposition to totalitarianism

A

”every line of serious work i have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism”

42
Q

George Orwell

Orwell cannot and does not avoid writing politically, he writes to expose and highlight certain issues

A

“my starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice”

“i write because there is some lie that i want to expose, some fact to which i want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing”

43
Q

George Orwell

the book is not an attack on socialism, it is an attack on abuse of ideology

A

“Nineteen Eighty-Four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour Party”

it is “a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable, and which have already been partly realised in communism and fascism”

44
Q

George Orwell

a prediction of the future

A

“i do not believe that the kind of society i describe necessarily will arrive, but i believe that something resembling it could arrive”

45
Q

George Orwell

(1984 functions as a warning to demonstrate that no one is exempt from totalitarianism and it needs to be fought against)

A

”totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere”

“the scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere”

46
Q

Will Howell

Orwell’s understanding of power and authority

A

“Orwell was a master in observing the operations of power”

his writings on his time spent in Burma as a policeman and his life in boarding school “reminds readers not just of the authoritarian world he grew up in… but of his first hand experience in it as a subject”

Orwell understood “the very heart of how authority functions… through elaborate demonstrations of total control (often with a violent outcome) or through the subtle day to day manipulation of the masses… much of Nineteen Eighty Four is preoccupied with highlighting this”

47
Q

Douglas Kellner

the danger of interpreting the novel as an attack on socialism

A

“because Nineteen Eighty-Four is such a powerful attack on state communism, there is a danger that it can be used by rightists to identify socialism with totalitarianism”

48
Q

Douglas Kellner

1984 is an attack on Stalinism and the idea of worshipping a higher power

A

“Nineteen Eighty Four can be read as an attack on a quite specific social formation: Stalinism”

49
Q

Stephen Spender

abuse of ideology

A

“1984 is a political novel in which politics has been completely purged of current assumptions such as that the left is good and the right bad”

“we are confronted with a world in which any side can use politics as an excuse for plunging the world in evil”

“Big Brother is really anti-Christ…. the tragedy of Orwell’s novel is that man — Big Brother — turns himself into God, but there is no God”

Nineteen Eighty-Four (10 decks)

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