Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
George Orwell
Update: 17 May 2008
Introduction
I offer this novel to you for many reasons. It's a love story -- a sad one, but a love story nonetheless. It depicts what is known as a "dystopia," an imaginary place or state in which life is bad thanks to oppression or terror. It's a political allegory, for it presents abstract ideas like freedom and repression and totalitarianism in the form of a dramatic story. A good many terms and phrases that we use today were born in this novel. Have you ever heard the term "Big Brother"? How about the phrase, "Big Brother is watching you"? Have you ever heard someone say, "I'm a victim of the politically correct thought police"? How about "Newspeak" or "groupthink"? All of these terms come from the novel. But also, I offer you this novel because the language is beautiful.In perhaps one of his most famous essays, "Politics and the English Language," Orwell argues for the need for beautiful language, and not just because it's aesthetically pleasing. He suggests that the lazy and inexact use of language leads to lazy and inexact thinking, and this kind of thinking leads not only to lazier and fuzzier language but, more insidiously, to a diminished political awareness of the people and ultimately to a culture easily dominated by bad guys. Rigorous and exact language -- beautiful language -- thus leads to clear thinking and to a culture not so easily bamboozled. Given that one of the aims of English 100, Freshman Composition, is to develop both your writing and your critical thinking, what better way to demonstrate the importance of language than to offer you a novel that gives you an idea of what can happen when a culture gets lazy with language.
Enjoy the read.