Nineteen Eighty Four

Language

‘Good prose should be like

a windowpane’
 A03
Show detailed understanding of the ways
in which writers' choices of form, structure
and language shape meanings

A GRADE
exploration and analysis of key
aspects of form, structure and
language with perceptive evaluation of
how they shape meanings
 Three areas to focus on when
considering language and Nineteen
Eighty Four

1. Orwell’s opinion of language

2. Language of the book itself (how
Orwell writes)
3. Language as a theme in itself
 Task
Connecting ideas, quotes, context, perceptions, interpretations
etc

You will be given four A4 cards containing points about the

novel and language

You must create a mind map using these, quotes from the book
and your own interpretations/explanations

You will need to begin by cutting up the quotes and grouping

them according to the headings (evident in bold)

Discuss and work as a group

Be prepared to present your work

Orwell’s thoughts on Language
The writer should be clear about what
he thinks and the language he uses to
express himself should be simple,
direct and plain

Clear connection between language

and politics.
 Politics and Language
Totalitariansim as the great political threat

Thrives on blurring of judgement and vagueness

of thought, feeling and language

Totalitariansim can only work if people are

changing their minds at will

Totalitariansim is easier if language (and

thought) is vague and indistinct
 Language of the Novel-1
Simple, direct concrete

Life is described exactness- attention to

telling detail

Imaginative quality

Life in a tolaitarian state

Different styles of language in the
novel -2
Meetings between Julia and Winston
Luxury of more poetic style
Paperweight and proles

What questions arise?

 The Theory and Practice of
Oligarchical Collectivism’ by
Emmanuel Goldstein
Dry language of political theory

Abstract scientific analysis

Clear but lacking concreteness

 Prole Language
Attempts to create the impression of the
speech of the proles

Failure?
 A05
Evaluate the significance of cultural,
historical and other contextual
influences upon literary texts and study
 Language- the theme
Society of newspeak- language of Ingsoc

‘The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc
and Ingsoc is Newspeak’

Syme the philologist

Destruction of words- freedom, democracy, love,honour, justic, humanity, religion’

No words = no ideas/concepts= thoughtcrime disappears

No grey areas/distinctions

‘The whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words- in
reality, only one word ‘ungood’ = bad, ‘plusgood’= very good, ‘

‘the beauty of the destruction of words’

 Language- the theme
To be human is to discriminate and judge, judgement involves the
exact use of language so that the mind knows where it stands.

Orwell-language and morality are closely related.

Not to use language clearly involves a descent into a kind of sub-

human state, whose speech is ‘uttered in unconsciousness’,
duckspeak

‘his head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at
which he was sitting, his spectatcles cuaght the light and presented
to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly
horrible, was that from the stream od sound that poured out of his
mouth, it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word’
‘Politics and the English Language’
Used this image of the two blank discs for eyes,
in a description of a tired political hack, mouthing
strings of phrases which have nothing to do with
thought or with the process of human life:

‘One often has the curious feeling that one is not

watching a live human being but some kind of
dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes
stronger at moments when the light catches the
speaker’s spectacles nd turns them into blank
discs which seem to have no eyes behind them’
 Appendix
Written in past tense which may or may
not indicate that the party was overthrown
at some stage