1984 newspeak essay

Newspeak is the fictional language Orwell invented for his novel 1984. It is used to control what people are capable of thinking.

• Newspeak, developed by the Party in " 1984 ", is designed to limit thought and prevent rebellion by reducing the complexity of language.
• Through Newspeak, Orwell explores the power of language to shape thought and control society, illustrating a method of totalitarian control.
• The novel showcases Newspeak's role in erasing historical truths and manipulating public perception, emphasizing the language's importance in maintaining the Party's dominance.

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The purpose of the language is to reduce “unnecessary” words and those that might lead the citizens of Oceania into thought patterns the Party wants to avoid. They believe if they can rid the English language of troubling words, then there will be no way that anyone can conceive of the concepts without them. 

It is a language that is still under construction as the novel’s plot is playing out. There are various iterations of the Newspeak dictionary, and one of Winston Smith ’s associates, Syme , is working on the text. The language reduces words to syllables and combines them together to create new, unusual words. 

When constructing this language, Orwell was influenced by real-life examples in Germany and Russia. The term “Nazi” is a reduction of “nationalsozialist” and “Gestapo” is a reduction of “Geheime Staatspolizei.” These syllabic abbreviations come from a human willingness to make complicated things easier. Today, the term “Newspeak” is applied in contemporary life when someone tries to introduce a new word into the vocabulary, particularly when politicians do so. 

George Orwell wrote a great deal about language, including his essay “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946. He also included an appendix at the back of 1984 that deals with the concepts of Newspeak. 

When writing about Newspeak, Orwell defined it in the appendix as: 

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc , or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. 

The development of the language, he continues on to say, was to make “all other modes of thought impossible.” 

Explore Newspeak

• 1 Newspeak Definition
• 2 List of Newspeak Words 
• 3 Examples of Newspeak in 1984 
• 4 Related Terms in 1984 

Newspeak Definition

Newspeak is a controlled, simplified version of English. It removes “subversive” concepts from the language that the Party wants its citizens to avoid.

These include expressions of personal identity, free will, or anything resembling a rebellion. It focuses on the ideology of INGSOC and the belief that the Party is all-knowing. 

Through the use of Newspeak, the Party is attempting to control what one is capable of thinking. It is one of the three tenants of INGSOC. The other two are doublethink and the mutability (or changeability) of the past. 

Orwell writes about Newspeak several times, stating that the language had a very specific purpose that complimented the use of doublethink. 

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. 

The Party sought to eliminate undesirable words and strip those words of “all secondary meanings whatever.” Orwell cites “free” as a good example. The word exists in Oceania but only in the context of something being “free” of trouble. For example, “The dog is free from lice.” There is no secondary meaning, such as “intellectually free.” 

List of Newspeak Words 

Below are a few of the many Newspeak words Orwell invented.

• Doubleplusgood

Doublethink

He wrote that Newspeak was designed to: 

not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

The alphabet was divided into different vocabularies, such as the “A” vocabulary that included words needed for “the business of everyday life.” This included words for eating, working, drinking, and riding in vehicles. These were words like “run” and “tree.” 

Words, Orwell noted, were also interchangeable. For example, adjectives were created by adding “ful” to the end of terms. For example, “speedful” means fast or rapid. 

Examples of Newspeak in 1984 

The ministry names .

The four ministries: The Ministry of Peace , The Ministry of Plenty , The Ministry of Truth , and The Ministry of Love, are introduced at the beginning of the novel. Their Newspeak abbreviations are some of the first Newspeak words that the reader is exposed to. They are Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty, as described by the narrator. 

Doublethink is one of the most essential Newspeak words in 1984. It refers to a type of cognitive dissonance where one is capable of bailing two things at once. These two things should, if one’s reasoning is clear, cancel one another out. 

The party slogans are one of the clearest examples of doublethink. It purports that one thing is another, even though those reading/hearing the slogan know it means something else entirely. For example: 

WAR IS PEACE  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Winston’s Work Messages 

When Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, he’s responsible for revising old documents to make them fit the Party narrative. He receives simplified messages that instruct him on his task. Orwell writes: 

Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon—not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words—which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran: 

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify  times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue  times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify  times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

Related Terms in 1984  

• INGSOC : newspeak for English Socialism, the governing system used throughout Oceania. 
• Doublethink : cognitive dissonance. Or the act of thinking two contradictory things at once. Or believing that the two things are true. 
• Ministry of Love : responsible for brainwashing the citizens of Oceania. 
• Ministry of Truth : the ministry responsible for changing history to suit the Party. 
• Thought Police : the group responsible for arresting those charged with thoughtcrime . 
• Room 101 : a room to which Winston Smith, and others, are taken when they are within the Ministry of Love. It contains everyone’s worst fears. For Smith, this is rats. 

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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by George Orwell

1984 newspeak.

The book's Appendix provides a detailed discussion of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania. Interestingly, the Appendix is written in the past tense, as though a historian is examining a past culture. Some argue that this tool suggests that the Party eventually falls.

The Appendix details the underlying principles of Newspeak. Essentially, the language was designed to limit the range of thought. The word classes are detailed as follows:

The A vocabulary consisted of everyday words used in the expression of simple thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.

The B vocabulary consisted of words created to hold political connotations and impose a politically desirable state of mind upon the user. Such words include compound words, like "Ingsoc" or "doublethink." Many meant the opposite of what they really were, in keeping with the concept of doublethink.

The C vocabulary consisted of scientific and technical terms, which behooved no one but scientists and technicians to use.

The grammar of Newspeak had two notable characteristics. First, there was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. A noun and a verb were basically the same, and formed the root for all other forms of the word. Adjectives were formed by tacking "-ful" onto the end of the word, i.e. "goodthinkful"; adverbs, by adding the suffix "-wise." Any word could be negated by the prefix "un-," and other prefixes like "plus-" and "doubleplus-" could strengthen the word, i.e "pluscold" and "doublepluscold." Second, the grammar was exceedingly regular, with very few exceptions. All past tenses were formed using "-ed," all plurals with "-s" or "-es," and comparatives with "-er" and "-est."

Euphony was privileged above everything except precision of meaning, because the end goal was to produce words that could be spoken so quickly that they would not have the time to prompt thought. In other words, people would be able to speak without thinking at all. The meanings of Newspeak words were carefully controlled so that in many cases most connotations were destroyed. For instance, the word "free" still existed, but only in the sense of something being "free from" something else, e.g. "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used with reference to political freedom, as this meaning had been drilled out of the word.

Newspeak therefore also precluded the ability to argue heretical opinions. Although it would have been possible to say " Big Brother is ungood," the words necessary to defend or argue this assertion did not exist. Through this process, Oldspeak (standard English) would become obsolete and impossible to understand or translate, since the meanings of its words would be impossible to express in Newspeak. As Winston's friend Syme states, in explaining how Newspeak will support the Party's goals, "Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

Some Newspeak words highlighted in the text include:

Ingsoc - English Socialism

Doublethink - The ability to simultaneously think two opposing thoughts.

Thoughtcrime - Anti-Party thoughts

Facecrime - Occurs when the face reveals the existence of thoughtcrime (either lacking in anti-Party vigor, or expressing distaste for Party actions).

Goodthinkful - Describes a person who thinks just as the Party wishes. Winston describes Katharine this way.

Speakwrite - A machine that transposes spoken word into written word.

Unperson - Someone the Party has vaporized; someone that no longer exists.

Doubleplusungood - Extremely bad.

1984 Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for 1984 is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Describe O’Briens apartment and lifestyle. How do they differ from Winston’s?

From the text:

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and...

What was the result of Washington exam

Sorry, I'm not sure what you are asking here.

how is one put into the inner or outer party in the book 1984

The Outer Party is a huge government bureaucracy. They hold positions of trust but are largely responsible for keeping the totalitarian structure of Big Brother functional. The Outer Party numbers around 18 to 19 percent of the population and the...

Study Guide for 1984

1984 study guide contains a biography of George Orwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• 1984 Summary
• Character List

Essays for 1984

1984 essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of 1984 by George Orwell.

• The Reflection of George Orwell
• Totalitarian Collectivism in 1984, or, Big Brother Loves You
• Sex as Rebellion
• Class Ties: The Dealings of Human Nature Depicted through Social Classes in 1984
• 1984: The Ultimate Parody of the Utopian World

Lesson Plan for 1984

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to 1984
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• 1984 Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for 1984

• Introduction
• Writing and publication

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1984 ">George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works, the Official Language of His Totalitarian Dystopia in 1984

in Literature | January 25th, 2017 18 Comments

As we not­ed yes­ter­day , and you like­ly noticed else­where, George Orwell’s clas­sic dystopi­an nov­el 1984 shot to the top of the charts—or the Ama­zon best­seller list—in the wake of “alter­na­tive facts,” the lat­est Orwellian coinage for bald-faced lying . The ridicu­lous phrase imme­di­ate­ly pro­duced a bar­rage of par­o­dies, hash­tags, and memes; healthy ways of vent­ing rage and dis­be­lief. But maybe there is a dan­ger there too, let­ting such words sink into the dis­course, lest they become what Orwell called “Newspeak.”

It’s easy to hear “Newspeak,” the “offi­cial lan­guage of Ocea­nia,” as “ news speak.” This is per­fect­ly rea­son­able, but it gives us the impres­sion that it relates strict­ly to its appear­ance in mass media. Orwell obvi­ous­ly intend­ed the ambiguity—it is the lan­guage of offi­cial pro­pa­gan­da after all—but the port­man­teau actu­al­ly comes from the words “new speak”—and it has been cre­at­ed to super­sede “Old­speak,” Orwell writes, “or Stan­dard Eng­lish, as we should call it.”

In oth­er words, Newspeak isn’t just a set of buzz­words, but the delib­er­ate replace­ment of one set of words in the lan­guage for anoth­er. The tran­si­tion is still in progress in the fic­tion­al 1984, but is expect­ed to be com­plet­ed “by about the year 2050.” Stu­dents of his­to­ry and lin­guis­tics will rec­og­nize that this is a ludi­crous­ly accel­er­at­ed pace for the com­plete replace­ment of one vocab­u­lary and syn­tax by anoth­er. (We might call Orwell’s Eng­lish Social­ists “ accel­er­a­tionsts .”) Newspeak appears not through his­to­ry or social change but through the will of the Par­ty.

The pur­pose of Newspeak was not only to pro­vide a medi­um of expres­sion for the world-view and men­tal habits prop­er to the devo­tees of Ing­soc, but to make all oth­er modes of thought impos­si­ble.

It’s entire­ly plau­si­ble that “alter­na­tive facts,” or “ alt­facts ,” would fit right into the “Ninth and Tenth Edi­tions of the Newspeak Dic­tio­nary,” though it might eas­i­ly fall out of favor and “be sup­pressed lat­er.” No telling if it would make the cut for “the final, per­fect­ed ver­sion” of Newspeak, “as embod­ied in the Eleventh Edi­tion of the Dic­tio­nary.”

These quo­ta­tions come not from the main text of 1984 but from an appen­dix called “ The Prin­ci­ples of Newspeak ,” which you can hear read at the top of the post. Here, Orwell dis­pas­sion­ate­ly dis­cuss­es the “per­fect­ed” form of Newspeak, includ­ing its gram­mat­i­cal “pecu­liar­i­ties,” such as “an almost com­plete inter­change­abil­i­ty between dif­fer­ent parts of speech” (an issue cur­rent trans­la­tors have encoun­tered ). He then intro­duces its vocab­u­lary, divid­ed into “three dis­tinct class­es,” A, B, and C.

The A class con­tains “every­day life” words that have been mutat­ed with cum­ber­some pre­fix­es and inten­si­fiers: “ uncold ” for warm, “ plus­cold and dou­ble­plus­cold ” for “very cold” and “superla­tive­ly cold.” The B class con­tains the com­pound words: sin­is­ter dou­ble­think coinages like “ joy­camp (forced-labor camp)” and “ Mini­pax (Min­istry of Peace, i.e. Min­istry of War).” These, Orwell explains, are sim­i­lar to “the char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­tures of polit­i­cal lan­guage… in total­i­tar­i­an coun­tries” of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

The cit­i­zen of Ocea­nia, Orwell tells us, must have “an out­look sim­i­lar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, with­out know­ing much else, that all nations oth­er than his own wor­shipped ‘false gods’.… His sex­u­al life, for exam­ple, was entire­ly reg­u­lat­ed by the two Newspeak words sex­crime (sex­u­al immoral­i­ty) and good­sex (chasti­ty).” The lat­ter includ­ed only “inter­course between man and wife, for the sole pur­pose of beget­ting chil­dren, and with­out phys­i­cal plea­sure on the part of he woman: all else was  sex­crime. ”

The C class of words may be the most insid­i­ous of all. While it “con­sist­ed entire­ly of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal terms” that “resem­bled the sci­en­tif­ic terms in use today,” the Par­ty took care “to define them rigid­ly and strip them of unde­sir­able mean­ings.” For exam­ple,

There was no vocab­u­lary express­ing the func­tion of Sci­ence as a habit of mind, or a method of thought irre­spec­tive of its par­tic­u­lar branch­es. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Sci­ence,’ any mean­ing that it could pos­si­bly bear being already suf­fi­cient­ly cov­ered by the word Ing­soc.

Orwell then goes on to dis­cuss the dif­fi­cul­ty of trans­lat­ing the work of the past into Newspeak. He uses as an exam­ple the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence:  “ All mans are equal was a pos­si­ble Newspeak sen­tence,” but only in that “it expressed a pal­pa­ble untruth—i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength.” As for the rest of Thomas Jefferson’s rous­ing pre­am­ble, “it would have been quite impos­si­ble to ren­der this into Newspeak,” writes Orwell. “The near­est one could come to doing so would be to swal­low the whole pas­sage up in the sin­gle word crime­think .”

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

George Orwell’s 1984 Is Now the #1 Best­selling Book on Ama­zon

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (18) |

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Comments (18), 18 comments so far.

i have been feel­ing this cloud for a few months about 1984 it was a school where we read it to this day i fear it

He’d be amused by the ‘fake news’ com­ing from BOTH sides of today’s cul­ture-wars…

“Polit­i­cal lan­guage… is designed to make lies sound truth­ful and mur­der respectable, and to give an appear­ance of solid­i­ty to pure wind.” George Orwell

SocJus has been doing this for years.

Hux­ley remark inter­est­ing- but I see both not either/or.

Help I am stuck in a Chi­nese for­tune cook­ie fac­to­ry

Inter­est­ing as 1984 Newspeak is, of course, a lan­guage, for exam­ple Eng­lish, is not a per­ma­nent unchang­ing thing. We can only just com­pre­hend Anglo-Sax­on or Medieval Eng­lish and Shake­speare is hard to inter­pret at times. Lan­guage is a tool of cul­ture and cul­ture is nev­er sta­t­ic. Words are being added and changed in mean­ing all the time. So I doubt any rul­ing class can con­trol its words and mean­ings though it may con­trol what it allows in media, eg gay is no longer the gay, mean­ing hap­py and care­free that I grew up with.

Yeah this is the one fact that I kept bump­ing back into as I tried to swal­low the con­cept. But in Ocea­nia it seems more fea­si­ble if you account for gen­er­a­tions of con­sis­tent con­trol of ALL media as well as a very effi­cient thinkpol.

How­ev­er… It would­n’t be long before the pro­les came up with their own street dialects of Newspeak that express their unortho­dox feel­ings most effi­cient­ly, and would even­tu­al­ly threat­en to ‘infect’ the lin­guis­tics of the Out­er par­ty much as the street slang of Amer­i­ca’s urban under­class­es has today deeply seeped through to the lan­guage of us, the blog­ging-yup­pie class (Amer­i­ca’s ‘Out­er Par­ty’).

You feel me John Raven?

The term “alter­na­tive facts” is a legal term that attor­neys use in ref­er­ence to argu­ing a posi­tion and Con­way is an attor­ney. The author of this piece knows, or should have known, this. This is an exam­ple of pur­pose­ful mis­un­der­stand­ing of a term in order to vil­i­fy some­one with whom you have an ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence of opin­ion. Iron­i­cal­ly, your asser­tion that “alter­na­tive facts” being Orwellian is actu­al­ly more Orwellian than the term itself.

“It’s entire­ly plau­si­ble that ‘alter­na­tive facts,’ or ‘alt­facts,’ would fit right into the ‘Ninth and Tenth Edi­tions of the Newspeak Dic­tio­nary,’ though it might eas­i­ly fall out of favor and ‘be sup­pressed lat­er.’ ”

Not only might it be sup­pressed lat­er, this would be essen­tial. The word’s very exis­tence in the lan­guage would acknowl­edge that there were by con­trast “real facts” out there.

Lat­inx, cis­gen­der, white fragili­ty, homo­pho­bia, safe space, vio­lent speech, undoc­u­ment­ed Amer­i­cans…

This arti­cle basi­cal­ly says that the “Newspeak” (word from Orwell’s nov­el) of the BLM riot­ers is impos­si­ble to use ratio­nal­ly. Newspeak = new speak, not news speak. It is a total­ly new lan­guage. This lan­guage is based on irra­tional whims (emo­tions), and you are auto­mat­i­cal­ly sup­posed to know what these words mean (you are sup­posed to be a “mind-read­er”). As an exam­ple, a “racist” is any­one who dis­agrees with the BLM riot­ers, what­ev­er that means. It is not sup­posed to be spe­cif­ic. Being spe­cif­ic implies that it is ratio­nal. It is not.

MTV con­vert peo­ple to newspeak. “Mans is bad innit”. is a per­fect exam­ple mean­ing “Do you think that man there is good” Orwell specif­i­cal­ly used ungood mean­ing the oppo­site of good but we are talk­ing of dou­ble­think and newspeak as it is today.

In times of Coro­na rad­i­cal con­struc­tivists or post­mod­ernists still do not acknowl­edge that there are real facts out there… they just wait for a vac­cine and do not talk about it^^.

As a senior and avid devo­tee to all things his­tor­i­cal, I don’t find this top­ic of News Speak any­thing new real­ly. In Roman times the rul­ing elite cajoled their poor by let­ting them watch gladiators,another word for kid­napped for­eign­ers, kill and mame with a free roast­ed kill of beau­ti­ful ani­mals after­wards. Cit­i­zen manip­u­la­tion is not new. Hence, us mass­es need to keep our­selves informed.

Orwell was an extreme­ly self-con­tra­dict­ing and self-iden­ti­ty loathing man. It was his sig­na­ture men­tal dish- he explained the dark­ness in oth­ers by reach­ing into him­self and find­ing a sim­i­lar dark­ness. The prob­lem is we aren’t used to that sort of hon­esty- so many folks take his crit­i­cism of a thing to mean he did­n’t sup­port it. Ing­soc is a good exam­ple; most peo­ple on the right con­sid­er Orwell an ene­my of social­ism as a result- they only read his fic­tion, it seems. Yet (full text at OrwellFoundation.com/Orwell/why-i-write ):

“Every line of seri­ous work that I have writ­ten since 1936 has been writ­ten, direct­ly or indi­rect­ly, against total­i­tar­i­an­ism and for demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism… And the more one is con­scious of one’s polit­i­cal bias, the more chance one has of act­ing polit­i­cal­ly with­out sac­ri­fic­ing one’s aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al integri­ty…

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to pro­duce a work of art’. I write it 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.”

Yes, Orwell hat­ed Com­mu­nism. Why? This is from the pref­ace to the Ukrain­ian edi­tion of Ani­mal Farm:

“In my opin­ion, noth­ing has con­tributed so much to the cor­rup­tion of the orig­i­nal idea of social­ism as the belief that Rus­sia is a social­ist coun­try and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imi­tat­ed. And so for the last ten years, I have been con­vinced that the destruc­tion of the Sovi­et myth was essen­tial if we want­ed a revival of the social­ist move­ment.”

Usu­al­ly, when I men­tion this, or that Orwell vol­un­teered to fight for a Marx­ist (anar­chist) antifa group, where his expe­ri­ence with social­ism made him a life­long devo­tee- they balk. It isn’t just that they dis­agree- it is that they dis­agree yet are some­how to busy to ver­i­fy quotes I bring that would show this to be true. Its cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance.

They would­n’t like his view of Amer­i­ca, for instance:

“Most of the employ­ees were the hard-boiled, Amer­i­can­ized, go-get­ting type to whom noth­ing in the world is sacred, except mon­ey. They had their cyn­i­cal code worked out. The pub­lic are swine; adver­tis­ing is the rat­tling of a stick inside a swill-buck­et. And yet beneath their cyn­i­cism there was the final naivete, the blind wor­ship of the mon­ey-god.” ‑Orwell, Keep the Aspidis­tra Fly­ing (1936)

Regard­ing the Nazism / social­ism thing: “the idea under­ly­ing Fas­cism is irrec­on­cil­ably dif­fer­ent from that which under­lies Social­ism. Social­ism aims, ulti­mate­ly, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equal­i­ty of human rights for grant­ed. Nazism assumes just the oppo­site. The dri­ving force behind the Nazi move­ment is the belief in human inequal­i­ty, the supe­ri­or­i­ty of Ger­mans to all oth­er races, the right of Ger­many to rule the world. Out­side the Ger­man Reich it does not rec­og­nize any oblig­a­tions.” ‑Orwell, The Lion and the Uni­corn (1941), Part II

UNHAVETHINK

We think it good­think that all mens are the same, that they have always had life, choice, and good­seek. To keep good­think, the Par­ty has always lived, tak­ing their pow­er with the good­think of mens. When the Par­ty is ungood to its pur­pose, the pro­les and the mens can unhave the Par­ty and have a new Par­ty…

(Note: I saw this as a chal­lenge a few years ago, and I took it on.)

The author is actu­al­ly quite gift­ed in newspeak, for he instinc­tive­ly choos­es an issue of rea­son­able debate on a cer­tain top­ic as being a off lim­its and unac­cept­able. The regime is always in newspeak mode, even when dis­cussing Orwell 1984. They cant help them­selves, its what they do.

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Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

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You probably didn’t read the most telling part of Orwell’s “1984”—the appendix

If there is any doubt about the persistent power of literature in the face of digital culture, it should be banished by the recent climb of George Orwell’s 1984 up the Amazon “Movers & Shakers” list. There is much that’s resonant for us in Orwell’s dystopia in the face of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA: the totalitarian State of Oceania, its sinister Big Brother, always watching, the history-erasing Ministry of Truth, and the menacing Thought Police, with their omnipresent telescreens. All this may seem to be the endgame of indiscriminate data mining, surveillance, and duplicitous government control. We look to 1984  as a clear cautionary tale, even a prophecy, of systematic abuse of power taken to the end of the line. However, the notion that the novel concludes with a brainwashed, broken protagonist, Winston Smith, weeping into his Victory Gin and the bitter sentence: “He loved Big Brother,” are not exactly right. Big Brother does not actually get the last word.

After “THE END,” Orwell includes another chapter, an appendix, called “The Principles of Newspeak.” Since it has the trappings of a tedious scholarly treatise, readers often skip the appendix. But it changes our whole understanding of the novel. Written from some unspecified point in the future, it suggests that Big Brother was eventually defeated. The victory is attributed not to individual rebels or to The Brotherhood, an anonymous resistance group, but rather to language itself. The appendix details Oceania’s attempt to replace Oldspeak, or English, with Newspeak, a linguistic shorthand that reduces the world of ideas to a set of simple, stark words. “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” It will render dissent “literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

But it never comes to pass. The Party’s plans—the abolition of the family, laughter, art, literature, curiosity, pleasure, in favor of a “boot stamping down on a human face forever”—are never achieved because Newspeak fails to take. Why? Because it was too difficult to translate Oldspeak literature into Newspeak. The text Orwell singles out to exemplify this, intriguingly, is the Declaration of Independence. The “author” of the appendix argues that these ideas cannot be expressed in Newspeak, specifically the part about governments deriving their legitimacy from the consent of the people, and citizens having the right to challenge any government that fails to honor the contract. As long as we have a nuanced, expansive system of language, Orwell claims, we will have freedom and the possibility of dissent.

This appeal to the integrity of language and principled thought may sound utopic or academic, but we are currently in the midst of a similar struggle. Consider the names of the post-9/11 programs that were ostensibly designed to protect the United States: the Patriot Act, Boundless Informant, and practices like “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The justifications of these 1984 -sounding schemes—and PRISM too—follow the obfuscating principles of Newspeak and the kind of manipulative euphemism Orwell skewers in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.” He writes: “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Orwell maintains that misleading terminology and evasive explanations are endemic to modern politics. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” including practices like imprisoning people “for years without trial,“ Orwell writes.

If the main story of  1984 is language and freedom of thought, a crucial part of the Snowden case is technology as a conduit of ideas. In Orwell’s novel, technology is a purely oppressive force, but in reality it can also be a means of liberation. Snowden has claimed that tech companies are in collusion with the government, but he’s also using those same channels of technology to tell his story. Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy the Pentagon Papers and distribute them in hard copies; now our language of dissent includes emails, tweets, and IMs.

It’s worth recalling Apple’s famous ad that unveiled the Macintosh computer to the world in 1984 , making full use of the reference to Orwell’s novel. A mass of worker drones trudges toward a screen showing a bespectacled leader proclaiming that, “We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths.” Suddenly, an athletic woman, in glorious technicolor, emerges with a hammer, the police in pursuit. She hurls the weapon at the screen and smashes the image. “On January 24th,” the screen tells us, “Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’” Apple’s Board of Directors tried to block the ad, but Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak pushed it through.

This is contemporary technology’s founding myth: the garage band ethos of its early founders going up against centralized, bureaucratic cultures like IBM by putting technology into the hands of the people. Obviously, scrappy startups have grown into multinational corporations led by wealthy CEOs, and most successful social networks are now run by powerful companies. However, we are surrounded by examples of technology used to question the status quo: Twitter and the Arab Spring is one example, Wikileaks is another, and so is Snowden.

When Orwell wrote 1984 , he was responding to the Cold War, not contemporary terrorism. He did not anticipate the full reach of digital technology. Even so, he was correct in seeing a future where the government had greater control but also a belief in the people’s ability to use language for dissent.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — 1984

Essays on 1984

Hook examples for "1984" essays, the dystopian warning hook.

Open your essay by discussing George Orwell's "1984" as a prophetic warning against totalitarianism and government surveillance. Explore how the novel's themes are eerily relevant in today's world.

The Orwellian Language Hook

Delve into the concept of Newspeak in "1984" and its parallels to modern language manipulation. Discuss how the novel's portrayal of controlled language reflects real-world instances of propaganda and censorship.

Big Brother is Watching Hook

Begin with a focus on surveillance and privacy concerns. Analyze the omnipresent surveillance in the novel and draw connections to contemporary debates over surveillance technologies, data privacy, and civil liberties.

The Power of Doublethink Hook

Explore the psychological manipulation in "1984" through the concept of doublethink. Discuss how individuals in the novel are coerced into accepting contradictory beliefs, and examine instances of cognitive dissonance in society today.

The Character of Winston Smith Hook

Introduce your readers to the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his journey of rebellion against the Party. Analyze his character development and the universal theme of resistance against oppressive regimes.

Technology and Control Hook

Discuss the role of technology in "1984" and its implications for control. Explore how advancements in surveillance technology, social media, and artificial intelligence resonate with the novel's themes of control and manipulation.

The Ministry of Truth Hook

Examine the Ministry of Truth in the novel, responsible for rewriting history. Compare this to the manipulation of information and historical revisionism in contemporary politics and media.

Media Manipulation and Fake News Hook

Draw parallels between the Party's manipulation of information in "1984" and the spread of misinformation and fake news in today's media landscape. Discuss the consequences of a distorted reality.

Relevance of Thoughtcrime Hook

Explore the concept of thoughtcrime and its impact on individual freedom in the novel. Discuss how society today grapples with issues related to freedom of thought, expression, and censorship.

The Importance of Fear in 1984

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Big Brother in George Orwell’s "1984"

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8 June 1949, George Orwell

Novel; Dystopia, Political Fiction, Social Science Fiction Novel

Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien, Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford, Ampleforth, Charrington, Tom Parsons, Syme, Mrs. Parsons, Katharine Smith

Since Orwell has been a democratic socialist, he has modelled his book and motives after the Stalinist Russia

Power, Repressive Behaviors, Totalitarianism, Mass Surveillance, Human Behaviors

The novel has brought up the "Orwellian" term, which stands for "Big Brother" "Thoughtcrime" and many other terms that we know well. It has been the reflection of totalitarianism

1984 represents a dystopian writing that has followed the life of Winston Smith who belongs to the "Party",which stands for the total control, which is also known as the Big Brother. It controls every aspect of people's lives. Is it ever possible to go against the system or will it take even more control. It constantly follows the fear and oppression with the surveillance being the main part of 1984. There is Party’s official O’Brien who is following the resistance movement, which represents an alternative, which is the symbol of hope.

Before George Orwell wrote his famous book, he worked for the BBC as the propagandist during World War II. The novel has been named 1980, then 1982 before finally settling on its name. Orwell fought tuberculosis while writing the novel. He died seven months after 1984 was published. Orwell almost died during the boating trip while he was writing the novel. Orwell himself has been under government surveillance. It was because of his socialist opinions. The slogan that the book uses "2 + 2 = 5" originally came from Communist Russia and stood for the five-year plan that had to be achieved during only four years. Orwell also used various Japanese propaganda when writing his novel, precisely his "Thought Police" idea.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.” “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred."

The most important aspect of 1984 is Thought Police, which controls every thought. It has been featured in numerous books, plays, music pieces, poetry, and anything that has been created when one had to deal with Social Science and Politics. Another factor that represents culmination is thinking about overthrowing the system or trying to organize a resistance movement. It has numerous reflections of the post WW2 world. Although the novella is graphic and quite intense, it portrays dictatorship and is driven by fear through the lens of its characters.

This essay topic is often used when writing about “The Big Brother” or totalitarian regimes, which makes 1984 a flexible topic that can be taken as the foundation. Even if you have to write about the use of fear by the political regimes, knowing the facts about this novel will help you to provide an example.

1. Enteen, G. M. (1984). George Orwell And the Theory of Totalitarianism: A 1984 Retrospective. The Journal of General Education, 36(3), 206-215. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27797000) 2. Hughes, I. (2021). 1984. Literary Cultures, 4(2). (https://journals.ntu.ac.uk/index.php/litc/article/view/340) 3. Patai, D. (1982). Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's 1984. PMLA, 97(5), 856-870. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/gamesmanship-and-androcentrism-in-orwells-1984/F1B026BE9D97EE0114E248AA733B189D) 4. Paden, R. (1984). Surveillance and Torture: Foucault and Orwell on the Methods of Discipline. Social Theory and Practice, 10(3), 261-271. (https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_1984_0010_0003_0261_0272) 5. Tyner, J. A. (2004). Self and space, resistance and discipline: a Foucauldian reading of George Orwell's 1984. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(1), 129-149. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464936032000137966) 6. Kellner, D. (1990). From 1984 to one-dimensional man: Critical reflections on Orwell and Marcuse. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 10, 223-52. (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/from1984toonedimensional.pdf) 7. Samuelson, P. (1984). Good legal writing: of Orwell and window panes. U. Pitt. L. Rev., 46, 149. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/upitt46&div=13&id=&page=) 8. Fadaee, E. (2011). Translation techniques of figures of speech: A case study of George Orwell's" 1984 and Animal Farm. Journal of English and Literature, 2(8), 174-181. (https://academicjournals.org/article/article1379427897_Fadaee.pdf) 9. Patai, D. (1984, January). Orwell's despair, Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 85-95). Pergamon. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0277539584900621) 10. Cole, M. B. (2022). The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984: Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times. Political Research Quarterly, 10659129221083286. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221083286)

Relevant topics

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Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four

This processes of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets . . . Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. (42)

Works Cited

Essay about Newspeak In George Orwells Novel 1984

In George Orwell’s novel 1984 the main character, 39 year old Winston Smith, lives in the superstate Oceania, a place controlled by Ingsoc which is Newspeak for English Socialism (the English Socialist Party). Winston’s story takes place in what he believes is the year 1984, a time when Newspeak is still being changed and integrated into the Party. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania, created by the Socialist Party with intentions to reduce range of thought, with intentions to eventually stop any thoughts deemed unacceptable.

Ingsoc wanted to create a language that would fulfil the requirements of the Party members while eliminating ambiguity, and at the same time control the way people think. The way that they were able to do these things was by stripping words of unorthodox or secondary meanings while creating some new words, but mostly eliminating a lot of words. By doing this it not only removed words but it also removed the correlating concepts, this way even if one wanted to express feelings against intellectual freedom a word wouldn’t exist for it.

In fact the word “free” only exists with the meaning of being free of something, such as “This apartment is free of ants. ” Of course in Winston’s world one wouldn’t want to express thoughts considered unacceptable to the party, but it wouldn’t even be necessary due to it already being a Thoughtcrime. Thoughtcrime (crimethink in Newspeak) is considered entertaining any thoughts opposing Ingsoc. Thoughtcrime is monitored by the Thought Police (Thinkpol in Newspeak) using surveillance.

It’s the job of the Thought Police to find and punish those who challenge the party by observing facial expressions and body language using the mandatory telescreens Party members have. Telescreens pick up anything above a whisper and one can only assume how often they might be watching or listening in. Living as a party member means having to train ones body language and facial expression to match whatever Ingsoc sees fit, until eventually it becomes habit. Still, the pressure of having to contently be conscious of how one appears could cause anyone to hate their own human nature.

Winston even mentions that “your worst enemy is your own nervous system”(63). There is even such thing as facecrime, which is defined as an improper expression such as anxiousness or doubt. For example, even if someone was muttering to himself, is considered a facecrime. Very distracting it must be to always have to pay attention to and fake facial expressions, something that is usually unconscious. Don’t forget about sleep, something else that is dangerous and unconscious. Winston talks about the Thought Police coming to vaporize people, always in the middle night.

In the beginning of Winston’s journaling, his thoughts drifted and he found himself accidently writing over and over “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER”(18). Putting these two things together it wouldn’t be difficult to suspect people sleep talking about their built up and repressed thoughts. It’s definitely a horrible reality, having all privacy prohibited, stuck between working and having shelter but being under strict control or being apart of the proles on the street. At least the proles aren’t under the same magnifying glass as the Party, instead they aren’t really seen as human at all.

However, the Proles have freedom that the Party doesn’t have, they aren’t watched by the telescreens, the government doesn’t care what they do besides work and reproduce. Proles can also have sex as they please, where as for Party members sex is suppose to be considered disgusting. The Party wants to remove any eroticism correlated with sex, the only purpose being to produce children. Ingsoc even has an “anti-sex league” to encourage celibacy. Really disturbing that Winston’s wife, Kathrine, would sometimes refer to trying for a baby as “our duty to the Party”, as if all maternal instinct has been washed away.

It’s an immensely better outcome that they couldn’t have children, for they would only be subject to the same brainwashing Winston wonders for everyone, why don’t the proles rise up and fight back? The sad reason they don’t being that they don’t really understand, even with eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, that they have any power at all. This must be the reason the government pays no attention to them, the Proles don’t have the mental capacity to rebel against them. Newspeak is divided into three different classes, A, B, and C vocabulary.

A vocabulary consists the words used for everyday life. Words used to express simple thoughts, and like the rest of Newspeak, words are stripped down to ridged definitions. A vocabulary works for the work place and everyday life but not for literature or more complex thoughts. Just how Big Brother likes it, the more mindless sheep-people the better, that way there’s no one to challenge Ingsoc ideals. In Newspeak many words have been destroyed that have opposites, for example “bad” can just as easily be expressed by “ungood” so it’s perfect for the Party’s wish to eliminate as many words as possible.

In terms of intensifying a word, the affix “plus” or “doubleplus” is what would be appropriate to use. B vocabulary (also known as compound words) was made for political purposes. Difficult to understand without grasping all principles of Ingsoc, B vocabulary consists of words that could have several ideas put into one. Basically imagine condensing sentences into a few words, what it would be like to think in abbreviations. C vocabulary was made up to fill in the gaps of the other two sets of vocabulary and consists only of scientific and technical terms.

Words not really needed in everyday or political use, but that are used mostly by science or tech workers belong in this category. Words are still stripped to remove any ambiguity. All different vocabularies of Newspeak have these things in common though: created to destroy the English language and the range of thought of those who speak it. Every aspect designed for mind control, so that by the time Newspeak is the only language, there wouldn’t even be a way to think against the Party.

After all, how can you think complex thoughts if no one is taught the vocabulary to enable complex ideas? One might think that reducing the amount of words in any normal vocabulary might increase the amount of meanings a single word has, but because meanings to words simply cease to exist instead of reassigning them to different words, this isn’t true. Newspeak along with other forms of control enforced upon Party members seem to be very effective. A smart move for Ingsoc, brainwashing the most susceptible, the children.

The youth of the Party are growing up in this dystopia and becoming apart of it. With the encouragement of their parents, children learning to become spies, watching for any disrespect for Big Brother. Assisted with eavesdropping equipment, sometimes children even turn in their own parents. As horrible as it is, it’s perfect for creating obedient Big Brother followers, especially when children never learn about the way the world really is, turning natural innocence to ignorance before they’ve had the chance to make the choice for themselves.

A way of rogramming norms into the children before they get the chance to experience anything else. It doesn’t seem like Winston thinks in Newspeak, even though he writes in it editing records at the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue in Newspeak). It’s very ironic that it’s called the Ministry of Truth because the actual work done there is far from it. Winston’s job entails interpreting orders (all in Newspeak) and editing records to fit whate hatever Ingsoc wants history to be, afterwards destroying all other previously existing copies, changing history at whim.

No wonder why Winston doesn’t know for certain the current year, people in this dystopia can’t be certain of anything. It would make a person feel crazy remembering an event, only to look through the records to find something completely different. How can anyone learn from a false past? Oh well, Big Brother doesn’t care about learning, he just cares about control. Another slogan of the Party: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. ” Overall, the future of Oceania is looking as corrupted and destroyed as what ingsoc did to the English language.

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Rewriting and Resisting Response (RRR)

 “Rewriting and Resisting Response” (RRR)

Call for Papers

Rewriting is as old as writing and literature. It is the reproduction and transformation of texts through the means of imitation, adaptation, parody, pastiche, paraphrase, commentary, plagiarism, and critical reading. Over the past century, the phenomenon seems to have taken a new direction by incorporating political, social, cultural, hermeneutical, and sexual attitudes that allowed texts to transcend their geographic, national and, above all, literary boundaries. (Rich, 32).  If one accepts the validity of Adrienne Rich’s assumption that every text has two aspects, depending on considerations of its production and reception, it follows that the writing is on the production side while reading and criticism, and hence re-writing, are on the other side.  

In a conference on Rewriting(s) organized by the Modern Humanities Research Association at the Senate House, London, October 2015, Professor Martin McLaughlin demonstrated in his key-note lecture how in any text we read, each sentence […] may contain ten other texts beneath it [1] . McLaughlin is here, perhaps, echoing the English novelist George Orwell, who already predicted in Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) that by 2050, or even earlier, probably- “the world will have been destroyed” (30) as a consequence of subsequent interpretations and / or rewritings that may ensue. “Figures like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and others”, claims Orwell, “will exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be” (30). It is, therefore, possible to argue that the recent developments in literary theory and critical studies in the 1950s and1960s have brought to the fore the claim on the involvement of the literary and non-literary in the social, historical and most of all political aspects of people’s everyday lives. This renders the text liable to change through rewriting and interpretation, and hence, always in a state of becoming.

Generally defined as the process of writing something again in a different manner, usually in order to improve (or to change) it, the phenomenon of rewriting, albeit ancient, seems to emerge as a recent practice textually and contextually bound to the postmodern and postcolonial condition. In fact, many factors intersect to explain the relationship between the process of rewriting and the afore-mentioned condition.

First, the major project of postmodernism which is “the deconstruction of the centralized, logocentric master narratives of Western culture” [2] overlaps that of postcolonialism which is “to dismantle the center margin binarism of the imperialist discourse” [3] . Second, postmodern theorists, according to Hannah Berry, realize, as do postcolonialists, that the past must be revised and refashioned into the structure of the present. Hence, the phenomenon of rewriting seems well-suited to subvert from within the old methods of classification, categorization and instrumentalization typical of classical, conservative and “scientific” studies of texts from the past. 

Rewritings are, moreover, inherently “violent” (Cohn, 43) in that they attempt to break into history and rework texts whose cultural centrality and historical persistence have been influential in defining representation and proliferating its paradigms.

The purpose of this CFP is to bring together researchers from various orientations to debate the phenomenon of rewriting and to focus on its revisionary and reactionary aspects towards points of source. Theories on rewriting define the phenomenon “as an act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new and critical direction” (Rich, 82) [4] . Rewriting is also approached in terms of the critical difference and distance a new text takes from an old one for a political purpose.

The concept of rewriting is, by and large, such a broad one that it is difficult to cover all its aspects in the limited scope a limited manuscript. Thus, narrowing it down to the idea of resisting response is worth considering.

[1] Martin McLaughlin ‘ Poliziano’s Stanze per la giostra:  Postmodern Poetics in a Proto-Renaissance poem’, in Italy in Crisis : 1494, ed by Jane Everson and Diego Zancani ( London: Legenda, 2000), pp. 129-51.

[2] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Tiffin Helen, The Empire Writes Back to the Center , pp. 9

[3] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Tiffin Helen, The Empire Writes Back to the Center , pp. 9

[4] Adrienne Rich “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision”, p. 22

Contributors are encouraged to focus their papers on the following research axes:

-         Rewriting as revision.

-         Re-writing as Resistance.

-         Rewriting and Re-righting.

-         Rewriting as Re-reading.

-         Rewriting and Representation.

-         Rewriting: Challenging boundaries.

-         Rewriting: discourse and counter-discourse.

-         Rewriting and multimodal communication.

-         Rewriting the world Constitutions.

-         Extracurricular Writing/ Rewriting.

-         Rewriting Pedagogy.

-         Rewriting and Cultural Psychology/ Ethnic Roots.

-         Rewriting and Cultural memory.

-         Rewriting cultural identities.

-         Re/writing selfhood and otherness.

-         Rewriting in/of the digital.

Paper Submission and Deadlines:

* Participants are kindly requested to submit their full papers for publication as a book chapter in a manuscript entitled Rewriting and Resisting Response (RRR) to the following email address: [email protected] . It is advisable that submissions take place no later than June 30, 2024. (Contributors who need extra time to finalize their papers by this date have to send us a notification).

 Note that prestigious articles will be considered for publication by either Palgrave Macmillan/ Palgrave Communications.