george orwell | The Smart Set

1984 in 2024

Matt Hanson — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Like existentialism, surreal, and (sorry, Alanis Morisette) ironic, the term “Orwellian” is ubiquitous and often misused. It’s typically applied to government surveillance or totalitarianism in general. This is understandable, given that British author Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, is likely best known for his novel 1984, which generations of […]

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Memoirs of an Ex-Pentecostal

Joseph Bassey — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

During the wee hours of New Year’s Eve, I was reading George Orwell’s Burmese Days and got to the third chapter where I came across an interesting conversation between two characters namely: Flory and the Doctor. In the course of the dialogue, Flory poses a profound question to the Doctor which stopped me in my […]

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Let Me Ruin This for You

Stephen Akey — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 12:30:03 +0000

About halfway through his essay “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” George Orwell offers a startling explanation for Leo Tolstoy’s notorious antipathy towards Shakespeare: Tolstoy is “trying to rob others of a pleasure he does not share.” Further, “Tolstoy does not know, perhaps, just what he misses in Shakespeare, but he is aware that he misses […]

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Novel Politics

Kelly Cherry — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 11:30:57 +0000

I do not say that the novel must be, or more often than not is, political. But where there are characters, the political may be found. A writer chooses to accent, plunge into, or ignore the political, but characters insist upon liking or disliking something that is happening or has happened or may happen. In […]

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Writing and Whistle-Blowing

Morgan Meis — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:12:43 +0000

George Orwell was not a political thinker, exactly. Sure, he wrote books like 1984 and Animal Farm. Those books are political. Or better put, they are political thought experiments in novel form. Orwell liked to think about totalitarianism. He created fictional scenarios like 1984 in order to think through the logic of totalitarianism, to find […]

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