English 144G
Orwell: Literature and Politics
Professor Woloch
Tue/Thu 11:00-12:30, Building 200-032
Office: Building 460, Room 307 email:
Office Hours: Tues: 2:00-3:00 phone: 723-4594
Thur: 2:00-4:00
Texts
Down and Out in Paris and London
The Road to Wigan Pier
Homage to Catalonia
Keep the Asidistra Flying
Animal Farm
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Collected Essays
W or the Memory of Childhood (Georges Perec)
Course Description
This course examines George Orwell’s centrality to twentieth-century politics and culture and his contested place within literary history and literary theory. We will survey his major fiction, memoirs and literary and political essays, from Down and Out in Paris in London to Nineteen Eighty-Four, looking at the work in relation to both modernist culture and to left-wing politics and debates. “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art,” Orwell writes in 1946. Orwell witnesses, confronts and represents a remarkable range of political situations and crises: imperialism, poverty, class inequality, revolution, civil war, and totalitarianism. At the same time, he restlessly experiments with an equally wide range of different literary forms, collapsing and confusing the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, novel and autobiography, essay and memoir, realism and allegory, first- and third-person narrative, and literary and journalistic writing. Our course will focus on Orwell’s experiments in literary form and genre; his shifting formulations of socialism and political resistance; and the ways in which his writing has been periodized and received.
Schedule
Jan 4: Introduction
Jan 6: “Why I Write” (1079-1085)
“A Hanging” (16-20)
“Revenge is Sour” (899-903)
“Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1044-48)
“Politics and the English Language” (954-967)
“As I Please 16” (565-67)
“As I Please 25” (602-605)
“Shooting an Elephant” (42-50)
Jan 25: Down and Out in Paris and London
Jan 27: “Blair to Orwell”(Raymond Williams); “How the Poor Die”
Jan 11: The Road to Wigan Pier
Jan 13: “Preface to The Road to Wigan Pier” (Victor Gollancz)
Jan 18: Homage to Catalonia
Jan 20: Homage to Catalonia
Feb 1: Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Feb 3: “The Cost of Letters” “Books v Cigarettes” “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”
Feb 8: “Inside the Whale” “Charles Dickens”
Feb 10: “Boy’s Weeklies” The Postcard Art of Donald McGill”
Feb 15: Animal Farm
Feb 17: Animal Farm, “Swift: Politics and Literature”
Feb 22: 1984, “Can Socialists be Happy?”
Feb 24: 1984
March 1: 1984
March 3 CLASS CANCELLED
March 8: W, or the Memory of Childhood (Georges Perec)
March 10: W, or the Memory of Childhood (Georges Perec)
Requirements
1. Commitment to reading. Set aside time to read these novels and essays -- be prepared for a steady reading load in this course.
2. Participation/Reading responses. You should be prepared each section to discuss the material -- to bring your own ideas and perspectives to the conversation and to have reflected on problems and passages that particularly interest you. Each week you should formulate a short reading response (1-2 pages) for one of the two class sessions, that will help open up the discussion.
These response papers, which are an important component of the course, have two main goals. First, to allow you to give more detailed attention to specific moments that you find interesting, significant or problematic. Try to focus as much as possible on particular passages – and to what these passages, in their precise use of language, syntax, rhetoric and form – tell us about the text more generally. The response can consist either of several questions that you develop from the reading or a more specific consideration of one aspect of the reading -- a character, episode, theme, image, situation, device, etc. -- that catches your attention. Second, since our class concentrates on the relationship between literature and politics, you should feel free to take an expansive view of Orwell’s work in relation to our own political world and to your own political actions, aspirations, experiences and beliefs. Has the week’s reading touched on your reading of other texts (such as contemporary newspaper coverage of current events)? Or on specific experiences you’ve had in thinking – and acting -- politically? Feel free to put this in dialogue with the work that we’re reading and writing about from week to week in the seminar.
3. Class presentation. Each student is responsible for opening one section with a five to ten minute presentation that is a more elaborated version of the weekly response. This doesn’t need to involve outside work. It should, again, focus as much as possible on a close reading of the novel’s or essay’s language. You should select a passage (or a few related passages), explain why it stands out or is important to the text as a whole and then analyze the form, language and structure of the passage in a way that leads out towards a larger discussion of the text. Each presenter will also email the class a group of questions beforehand that can help direct discussion.
4. Final essay. Ten to twelve pages. This should be a topic that you develop in consultation with me during the quarter.