Orwell
Academic Video Online - 35 minutes
This film by Malcolm Hossick follows the life and work of George Orwell. May rate him as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The film is followed by a brief summary of his works.
George Orwell
Academic Video Online - 31 minutes
Follows George Orwell's developing political awareness, his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and his success as a writer.
1984 and Philosophy
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Although the year 1984 is hurtling back into the distant past, Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to have a huge readership and to help shape the world of 2084. Sales of Orwell's terrifying tale have recently spiked because of current worries about alternate facts, post-truth, and fake news. 1984 and Philosophy brings together brand new, up-to-the-minute thinking by philosophers about Nineteen Eighty-Four as it relates to today's culture, politics, and everyday life. Some of the thinking amounts to thoughtcrime, but we managed to sneak it past the agents of the Ministry of Truth, so this is a book to be read quickly before the words on the page mysteriously transform into something different. Who's controlling our lives and are they getting even more levers to control us? Is truth objective or just made up? What did Orwell get right--and did he get some things wrong? Are social media opportunities for liberation or instruments of oppression? How can we fight back against totalitarian control? Can Big Brother compel us to love him? How does the language we use affect the way we think? Do we really need the unifying power of hate? Why did Orwell make Nineteen Eighty-Four so desperately hopeless? Can science be protected from poisonous ideology? Can we really believe two contradictory things at once? Who surveils the surveilors?
Nineteen Eighty-Four
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The Novel that popularized the term Orwellian depicts one of the classic dystopias of all time: a totalitarian society where Big Brother watches every move, history is revised to suit the Party's wishes, and Thought Police torture suspected ""thoughtcriminals."" This volume includes essays that profile the life of George Orwell and his politics, as well as compare Nineteen Eighty-Four to other dystopian novels such as Brave New World, We, and Fahrenheit 451. Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of ""Works Cited,"" along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources: About This Volume Critical Context: Original Introductory Essays Critical Readings: Original In-Depth Essays Further Readings Detailed Bibliography Detailed Bio of the Editor General Subject Index .
Orwell Reconsidered
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George Orwell has had a profound influence on modern politics and culture. He is regularly invoked as an authority by journalists, commentators and politicians, and his works speak with increasing relevance to our polarised and media-saturated society. Stephen Ingle explores Orwell's character, his life and his beliefs by guiding the reader through the main events, private and public, that shaped his life and major works. This includes his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War as well as the writing of classics like Animal Farmand 1984. The book also reconsiders Orwell's legacy and contextualises his contemporary resonance. Orwell, it is argued, is more concerned with morality than ideology. This book will be of significant interest to students and other readers interested in Orwell's life as well as his profound contribution to the history of social and political thought and English literature.
The Graphic Novel
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Critical Insights: The Graphic Novel offers an examination and analysis of the contemporary graphic novel as literature. Specific attention will be paid to the use of narrative genre in the graphic novel (e.g. the superhero graphic novel, the crime narrative graphic novel, the horror graphic novel, and the realistic/fantastic graphic novel). Attention will also be paid to the most important and most frequently discussed graphic novels published during the past three decades, including Batman: The Drak Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Watchman by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, The Crow by J.O'Barr, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller, The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner, Maus by Art Spiegelman. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, and Sandman: preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith (et al).
The Human Rights Graphic Novel
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This book studies human rights discourse across a variety of graphic novels, both fiction and non-fiction, originating in different parts of the world, from India to South Africa, Sarajevo to Vietnam, with texts on the Holocaust, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Rwandan and Sarajevan genocides, the Vietnam War, comfort women in World War II and the Civil Rights movement in the USA, to mention a few. The book demonstrates the emergence of the 'universal' subject of human rights, despite the variations in contexts. It shows how war, rape, genocide, abuse, social iniquity, caste and race erode personhood in multiple ways in the graphic novel, which portrays the construction of vulnerable subjects, the cultural trauma of collectives, the crisis and necessity of witnessing, and resilience-resistance through specific representational and aesthetic strategies. It covers a large number of authors and artists: Joe Sacco, Joe Kubert, Matt Johnson-Walter Pleece, Guy Delisle, Appupen, Thi Bui, Olivier Kugler and others. Through a study of these vastly different authors and styles, the book proposes that the graphic novel as a form is perfectly suited to the 'culture' and the lingua franca of human rights due to its amenability to experimentation and the sheer range within the form. The book will appeal to scholars in comics studies, human rights studies, visual culture studies and to the general reader with an interest in these fields.
George Orwell's Perverse Humanity
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This is the first book to focus primarily on George Orwell's ideas about free speech and related matters - freedom of the press, the writer's freedom of expression, honesty and truthfulness - and, in particular, the ways in which they are linked to his political vision of socialism. Orwell is today claimed by the Left and Right, by neo-conservatives and neo-socialists. How is that possible? Part of the answer, as Glenn Burgess reveals, is that Orwell was an odd sort of socialist. The development of Orwell's socialism was, from the start, conditioned by his individualist and liberal commitments. The hopes he attached to socialism were for a fairer, more equal world that would permit human freedom and individuality to flourish, completing, not destroying, the work of liberalism. Freedom of thought was a central part of this, and its defence and use were essential parts of the struggle to ensure that socialism developed in a liberal, humane form that did not follow the totalitarian path of Soviet communism. Written in celebration of Orwell's dictum, 'We hold that the most perverse human being is more interesting than the most orthodox gramophone record,' George Orwell's Perverse Humanity is a portrait of Orwell that captures these themes and provides a new understanding of him as a political thinker and activist. Based on archival research and new materials that affirm his work as an activist for freedom, it also uncovers a socialist ideology that has been obscured in just the way that the author feared it would be - associated in many people's minds with totalitarian unfreedom.
