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Creating Society in Orwell’s 1984
Abstract
In this paper, the idea of constructing a new society in George Orwell’s 1984 is analyzed in the context of the Paris School’s semiotics trajectory. Saussurean legacy, which heavily sheds light on the semiotic conception of the school proposed by Greimas, asserts the significance of dichotomies for signs to gain their meaning. Accordingly, the study is grounded on the desired and non-desired contrariety to make the analysis with the semiotic square meaningful. It is possible to encounter the traces of the proposed idea pertaining to the struggle of forming an ideal society at all levels of meaning, predominantly at the deep level as the proposed idea represents the elementary meaning of the narrative, throughout the text. Considering the approach, desired society gains its meaning in the face of the non-desired one relativistically. Regarding the opposition theory of Saussure, what is good for the Party is not supposed to be good for the Opponents. For this reason, the idea of creating society is on the battleground, as there is an uphill fight between the ruling Party and the Opponents. The formation of desired society is revealed thanks to the semiotic square by focusing on both positive and negative transition processes. The really interesting aspect that we encountered is the vicious unended cycle and the war that will never end between the stated groups within the framework of the ideology/axiology perspective.
... A study analyzing Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four within the framework of social psychology has not been identified in the literature. Although not directly within the framework of social psychology, it is possible to come across research on the author's work within the framework of some social psychological concepts (Kalelioğlu, 2018;Yeo, 2010). The fact that the current study comprehensively examines Nineteen Eighty-Four is the main point where it differs from other studies in the literature. ...
... Sosyal psikoloji çerçevesinde Orwell'in 1984 eserinin incelendiği bir araştırma literatürde tespit edilmemiştir. Doğrudan sosyal psikoloji çerçevesinde olmasa da bazı sosyal psikolojik kavramlar çerçevesinde yazarın adı geçen eseriyle ilgili araştırmalara rastlamak mümkündür (Kalelioğlu, 2018;Yeo, 2010). Mevcut araştırmanın 1984 adlı eseri kapsamlı olarak incelemesi, alan yazınındaki diğer araştırmalardan ayrıldığı temel noktadır. ...
Bu çalışmanın amacı George Orwell'in 1984 romanının sosyal psikolojik kavramlarla incelenmesidir. Çalışmada veriler nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden doküman analizi yöntemi ile toplanmıştır. Elde edilen veriler içerik analizi yöntemi ile analiz edilmiştir. Sosyal psikolojinin sosyalleşme, sosyal biliş, sosyal etki ve uyma davranışı, tutum, grup dinamiği, benlik, iletişim ve propaganda kavramları öncelikle tanımlanmış ve bu kavramlar çerçevesinde bulgular değerlendirilmiştir. Çalışmanın bulguları romandan alıntılarla desteklenerek sunulmuştur. Çalışma sonucuna göre George Orwell'in 1984 romanının sosyal psikolojik kavramlarla incelenmesi için elverişli olduğu söylenebilir. Tartışma ve sonuç bölümünde ilgili literatür bağlamında mevcut çalışma değerlendirilmiştir. Son bölümde ise gelecekteki araştırmalara öneriler sunulmuştur.
... Orwell)". In the field of semiotics, [5] states that the interesting aspect encountered in Orwell's 1984 is the vicious unended cycle and the war that will never end between the stated groups within the framework of the ideology/axiology perspective". When it comes to word embeddings applied to literary arts, [6] extracted a social network from a literary text and "the experiments suggest that specific types of word embeddings like word2vec are well-suited for the task at hand and the specific circumstances of literary fiction text". ...
The aim of this study is to analyze the semantic organization of the text “Shooting an Elephant.” The research is carried out with a multidisciplinary perspective using semantic and semiotic data. The theory of semantics is used to examine the words which predominately form the meaning universe of the text. The analysis is fulfilled within the scope of meaning relations as denotation/connotation and synonymy/antonymy in the lexical field. Then the transsentential signs which have a critical role in the construction of the semantic universe of the text are interpreted in the sense of semiotics. The production process of the descriptive, narrative, and thematic meaning layers is revealed throughout the study. Besides bringing the semantic universe of the narrative with its constructive components to light over the course of the study, the impressive dominance of particular signs and their contribution to the narrative are discussed to reveal the loss of identity of the West.
Privacy, surveillance, and government abuse of data are concerns of many people in our complex digital world. ‘Big Brother’ in the title of this article is a metaphorical warning about the consequences if government uses modern technologies to maintain power and control people. Issues related to the abuse of data and surveillance are not new in the academic literature and mass market media, the current threat is however greater. Technology has advanced to the point where George Orwell’s dystopian ‘Big Brother’ vision of a totalitarian state is possible. Because of technology advances, barriers associated with collecting and processing real-time data about many millions of individuals have been removed. This article explores how the capture and use of new data streams, and processing with AI and predictive analytics can support government control of its citizens. Some components of a system for thought control and real-time surveillance are already in use. These components like cameras, sensors, No SQL databases, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence can be connected and improved. Decision support researchers must understand the issues and resist attempts to use information technologies to support current or future totalitarian governments.
Most commentary on the Edward Snowden affair and other recent accounts of government spying leaked in the media has focused on individual privacy concerns, while overlooking how contemporary neoliberal modernity has created a social order in which new surveillance technologies grant the state a degree of power unthinkable to past generations - exceeding in reach and complexity even the totalitarian state imagined in Orwell's dystopian account, 1984. Any critical analysis of the modern surveillance state must move beyond documenting abuses of state power to address how government repression has been allowed to proceed unchecked, and even to flourish, through its support of an antidemocratic public pedagogy produced and circulated via a depoliticizing machinery of fear and consumption. In the USA, repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market as well as a corresponding loss of public memory and political identity to encourage the widespread embrace of an authoritarian surveillance culture. The state and corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to socialize everyone into a surveillance regime, even as personal information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based sites as people move across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. It is no longer possible to address the violations committed by the surveillance state without also analysing this broader regime of security and commodification. The authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus in the USA can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of entertainment, commerce and punishment, and the increasing labelling of democratic dissent as an act of terrorism. If democracy is to have a future in America, then it is imperative to organize social movements capable of recovering public memory and reclaiming dissent as essential features of responsible citizenship.
Translated by Paul Perron Maupassant's short story, “Two Friends”, is examined in order to test methodological tools and to hone them for their application in the analysis of narrative discourse, starting from the oral tale (Propp) and ending with the written tale instituted as literary genre. Complex procedures of textual production are identified: among which entire sequences as well as the “evenemential” level of narrative fade away in favor of its cognitive dimension. This semiotic investigation is accompanied by a challenge to certain conventions of literary criticism: dialogue, the locus of Realist stereotypes, appears laden with paradoxical truths; the description of nature, inherited from the Romantics, bristles with narrative intent, and entire sections of a valorized figurative universe unfold before us. Thematic readings are linked up with semantic analysis: the figure of Water exerts its profound fascination. A Christian symbolics is uncovered which traverses the text and invites us to read it as a new Gospel Parable. New readings complement older ones and remain as so many suspended possibilities. The tale appears somewhat as a sonnet, that is to say as a “fixed-form” genre, where the closure of the text would be a necessary condition for transcending it.
Anlamlandırma kuramı olan göstergebilimsel eleştiri son zamanlarda farklı alanlardan araştırmacıların yoğun ilgisini çekmektedir. Göstergebilim kuramıyla anlamlandırma çalışmalarının yapıldığı bu alanlardan birisi de edebiyattır. Göstergebilim ve edebiyat arasındaki etkin etkileşimin sonucunda da yazınsal göstergebilim kuramı ortaya çıkmıştır. Yazınsal göstergebilim sayesinde metni oluşturan anlam evreninin üretim süreci ortaya çıkarılmaktadır. Ancak göstergebilim kuramının kendine özgü kavram, kural ve sistematiği, metnin anlam katmanlarına nüfuz ederek anlamın üretiliş biçimini ortaya çıkarmak isteyen yeni araştırmacılar için bir engel teşkil etmekte ve kuramın uygulanmasındaki sıkıntıları da birlikte getirmektedir. Bu çalışma, edebi bir metni anlamlandırma sürecinde sistematikleştirilmiş göstergebilimsel bir çözümlemenin aşamalarını, bu aşamalarda kullanılan çözümleme araçlarını ortaya çıkarmayı hedeflemiştir. Bir anlamlama kuramı olan göstergebilim kapsamında gösterge çalışmalarının tarihsel gelişim süreci, dil ve edebiyat ilişkisi, yazınsal göstergebilim kuramı ve kurama ait çözümleme araçları irdelenecektir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: göstergebilim, yazınsal göstergebilim, anlatı izlencesi, eyleyensel şema, göstergebilimsel kare.
After decades of financial struggle as the author of four naturalistic novels, three critically acclaimed but politically controversial documentaries, and a body of literary essays and journalism, suddenly Orwell emerged as a major writer of international repute with two satires, the political allegory of Animal Farm in 1945, and the dystopian satire Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, a few months before his death. A wide array of critical reviews by Golo Mann, Lionel Trilling, Arthur Koestler, V. S. Pritchett and Bertrand Russell among others - some of them also taking the shape of obituaries - identified his last novel as an outstanding achievement. In his 2003 Scenes from an Afterlife: the Legacy of George Orwell, John Rodden points out that after his early death, Orwell's life became a legend still vital and alive all over the world today, an observation echoing the one made by Jenni Calder in what Gunter Grass called, aptly, the Orwell decade of the 1980s. Orwell's last two novels, Calder states, are not only part of our literary tradition and heritage, but [also] have entered our mythology (Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: Open Guides to Literature, 1987). But figures in mythology are not necessarily beyond political controversy. Providing an encyclopedic view of the controversies in Orwell's reception up to the mid-1980s, in The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of St George Orwell (1989) Rodden outlines not only a picture gallery of Orwell's widely different critical portrayals as The rebel, The common man, The prophet and The saint, but also the battles among the body snatchers, critics of the most diverse political persuasion, who argue that if Orwell, the man who claimed to fight for democratic socialism and against totalitarianism, were alive today, he would be on their side.
In a timely and radically new reappraisal of George Orwell's fiction, Loraine Saunders reads Orwell's novels as tales of successful emancipation rather than as chronicles of failure. Contending that Orwell's novels have been undervalued as works of art, she offers extensive textual analysis to reveal an author who is in far more control of his prose than has been appreciated. Persuasively demonstrating that Orwell's novels of the 1930s such as A Clergyman's Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying are no less important as literature than Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Saunders argues they have been victims of a critical tradition whose practitioners have misunderstood Orwell's narrative style, failed to appreciate Orwell's political stance, and were predisposed to find little merit in Orwell's novels. Saunders devotes significant attention to George Gissing's influence on Orwell, particularly with regard to his representations of women. She also examines Orwell's socialism in the context of the political climate of the 1930s, finding that Orwell, in his successful negotiation of the fine balance between art and propaganda, had much more in common with Charlie Chaplin than with writers like Stephen Spender or W. H. Auden. As a result of Saunders's detailed and accessible analysis, which illuminates how Orwell harmonized allegory with documentary, polyphonic voice with monophonic, and elegy with comedy, Orwell's contributions to the genre of political fiction are finally recognized.
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