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Reluctant Fundamentalist - close text analysis

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Reluctant Fundamentalist - close text analysis

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How the Poor Die By: George Orwell Continued... This essay would be relevant today in some developing countries, but not in Europe or the United States. However Orwell’s reference to “…the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers.” is applicable

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'Why I Write' is an essay by George Orwell, published in 1946 after the publication of his novella Animal Farm and before he wrote his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The essay is an insightful piece of memoir about Orwell's early years and how he developed as a writer, from harbouring ambitions to write self-consciously literary works to developing, in the 1930s, into the author of sharp political commentary in both fiction and non-fiction.

You can read 'Why I Write' here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Orwell's essay below.
'Why I Write': summary
Orwell begins by observing that he knew he should be a writer from a very young age. Although in early adulthood he tried to 'abandon' the idea, he knew it was his true calling and that he would eventually 'settle down and write books'.

He tells us that he was a lonely child who would make up stories and hold conversations with imaginary people, and that his own desire to write is linked to this childhood loneliness. During the First World War, when Orwell was still a child, he had two poems published in the local newspaper, and that was the beginning of his publishing career.

In his youth, he continued to think like a writer, making up a 'continuous "story" about myself', but never writing it down. When he was in his twenties, he had ambitions of writing 'enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound'. Orwell calls his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), this kind of book.

Orwell then outlines what he sees as four chief motives for anyone becoming a writer: 1) egoism; 2) aesthetic enthusiasm; 3) historical impulse; and 4) political purpose.

Egoism is the desire to be thought clever, be talked about when alive, and remembered after death. Aesthetic enthusiasm is the perception of beauty in the world around the writer, as well as the beauty of language. The historical impulse is a desire to see things as they are and present the facts to readers. Political purpose is the urge to change people's views of the kind of society they want to live in.

This last one is a matter of degree, because Orwell argues that every writer adopts some kind of political position: 'Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.'

Perhaps surprisingly given he is principally known for 'political' writing, Orwell confides that by nature he is someone for whom the first three motives would usually outweigh the fourth. But when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Orwell knew where he stood. As he famously declares: 'Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.'

Orwell concludes 'Why I Write' by stating that in the decade since 1936 he has tried to turn political writing 'into an art'. Although he acknowledges that his impulse has not been entirely public-spirited but just as egoistic and 'vain' as it is in most writers, he knows that 'one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.' The political scene has helped Orwell to sharpen his own writing.
'Why I Write': analysis
Orwell's essay is of interest as a piece of autobiography, but Orwell extrapolates from his own personal background and literary trajectory to make more universal statements about good writing, and the reasons why all writers choose to write for a living (if they're indeed lucky enough to do it for a living: in his ' Confessions of a Book Reviewer ', also from 1946, he brilliantly outlines the absurd and stressful existence of struggling writers surviving on hackwork for newspapers and magazines, just to pay that month's rent).

One of the key insights in 'Why I Write' is the link Orwell makes between his own efforts to become a successful writer and the broader political scene in Europe (and beyond) at the time. The Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Nazism, fascism, and Stalinism, all gave him a clear sense of what he should write about. As he puts it, all of his serious work written since has been ' against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism'.

We find this even in an essay like ' Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels' (which, along with his analysis of Dickens's art, shows what a fine and sensitive literary critic Orwell was), another 1946 essay, in which Orwell argues that in Book IV of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift depicts what we would now call a totalitarian society. But because Gulliver (and, presumably, by extension, Swift himself) approves of the Houyhnhnms' society, Swift admires the idea of a totalitarian state in which dissident opinion is unacceptable.

The point is that when he lacked a clear motivation for writing fiction, he churned out 'lifeless' work (much of which, such as his novel A Clergyman's Daughter, a kind of Joycean work in many ways, he later disowned, calling it 'tripe').

But once he realised what his subject-matter should be, this new-found 'political purpose' sharpened his prose. In a sense, the fourth of Orwell's listed motives brought the other three into a new perspective. His clearest and most detailed account of what constitutes good political writing is his essay ' Politics and the English Language' (also from 1946), which we have analysed here.

In 1976, Joan Didion wrote her own essay called ' Why I Write', in which she acknowledged that she had taken her title from George Orwell. She also drew attention to the triple-assonance in Orwell's title, the long I sounds of 'Why I Write'.

Even Orwell's title is itself an example of the clear-minded simplicity which he identifies as the chief feature of good writing at the end of 'Why I Write': 'Good prose is like a window pane.' But as so often with Orwell's work, he is not just writing about himself, but drawing attention to far more widespread truths about what motivates an author to devote their lives to writing.

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A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell's 'Why I Write'

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'Why I Write' is an essay by George Orwell, published in 1946 after the publication of his novella Animal Farm and before he wrote his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The essay is an insightful piece of memoir about Orwell's early years and how he developed as a writer, from...

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George Orwell - Shooting an Elphant analysis

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George Orwell - Shooting an Elphant analysis

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George Orwell, a prominent 20th-century author, isn't known for a collection of short essays called "Shooting an Elephant." There is, however, a famous essay by Orwell titled "Shooting an Elephant." This powerful piece uses a specific incident from his time as a police officer in British-ruled Burma to explore broader themes.

The essay doesn't simply recount the act of shooting an elephant. It delves into the psychological pressure placed on Orwell by his colonial position. He describes the internal conflict between his duty to maintain authority and his personal opposition to the violence. Through this experience, Orwell critiques the dehumanizing nature of colonialism for both the colonizer and the colonized.

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A Collection of Essays
by George Orwell.
Doubleday, 1952. [Harcourt, 1970]

Reviewed by John P. Rossi

George Orwell was the greatest essayist of the twentieth century.

Sixty years ago, at the height of his fame as the author of Animal Farm, Orwell published a collection of essays that first revealed to a wide audience his skill in this most difficult of literary forms. Called Critical Essays in England, it was renamed Dickens, Dali, and Others when it appeared in the United States. It wasn't his first book of essays. An earlier anthology, Inside the Whale, appeared in the early days of World War II but got lost in the dramatic events of the spring of 1940 when Hitler's legions swept across Western Europe. Inside the Whale was quickly forgotten, although the distinguished literary critic Q. D. Leavis asserted that it showed that Orwell was one of the best prose stylists then writing in English.

Unfortunately for Orwell, writing essays was not financially profitable. For Inside the Whale his advance from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, was just thirty pounds. Orwell said he enjoyed analyzing literary figures but there was no money in it.

In 1952, two years after his death, with Orwell's popularity growing due to the success of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a new version of his best non-fiction was published in America under the title A Collection of Essays. It was compiled from previously published material culled from both Inside the Whale and Critical Essays, plus an unpublished piece, a remarkable, often unforgettable portrait of his early school days, "Such, Such Were the Joys." This volume was the work of the young publishing genius Jason Epstein, who had convinced Doubleday that there was a market among upscale readers and college students for quality paperbacks. A Collection of Essays was one of the first and most successful of the Anchor Books series which Epstein started and it remains in print and continues to sell today.

A Collection of Essays consists of fourteen pieces, of which the lead essay, the twenty-thousand word "Such, Such Were the Joys" about Orwell's traumatic schooldays, could only be published in the United States because of English libel laws. It is also the longest essay Orwell wrote. It has been argued by some Orwell scholars that his unhappy experiences at school influenced his conception of the grim future in Nineteen Eighty-Four. His biographer, Bernard Crick in George Orwell: A Life, dismisses the notion that "Such, Such, Were the Joys" was written just before Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four and reflected the tuberculosis that was ravaging him at the time. Crick shows that Orwell began the essay in the early 1940s and thus there was no direct connection to the novel.

Orwell's portrait of his school, St. Cyprian's, called Crossgates in the essay, is in a tradition of horror tales of English education. It bears some resemblance to Winston Churchill's experience at school in his My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930). Like Churchill, Orwell portrays himself as a frightened little boy, easily intimidated by his classmates, bullied by the teachers, and generally miserable. Neither Churchill nor Orwell admitted learning much at school.

"Such, Such Were the Joys" reveals Orwell's skill at finding meaning in otherwise trivial events and avoiding the trap of self-pity. He tells how he was accused of some school infraction. He was innocent, but it didn't matter; he felt guilty. It taught him that you could "commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it ... But at any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good." It was a thought that remained with him for the rest of his life.

The other essays in the 1952 edition had appeared before, and at least two, "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics and the English Language," already were well on their way to becoming classics. These two would be anthologized in American high school and college English texts as examples of good prose and would influence a generation of aspiring writers.

The remaining essays are a testament to the breadth of Orwell's interests. They include interpretations of two controversial individuals, Rudyard Kipling and Mohandas Gandhi; an indictment of the evils of imperialism, "Marrakech"; and two essays that deal with key events in the recent past, "England Your England" and "Looking Back on the Spanish War." The former is part one of Orwell's elaboration of the uniqueness of the English national character and his defense of the concept of patriotism he first outlined early in World War II in his monograph The Lion and the Unicorn (1940).

"Looking Back on the Spanish War" is in many ways a summary of Orwell's controversial analysis of the Spanish Civil War, which he first outlined in Homage to Catalonia (1938). It is a bitter indictment of the failure of the left in England to speak out against Communist treachery in Spain. It also contains the first inkling of Orwell's fear that the very idea of historical truth was disappearing in the face of lies and propaganda, an idea that would show up in his last two novels. He wrote that he feared that the very idea that history could be truthfully written was fading, along with the idea that such a thing as truth can exist. He wasn't far off in that, as the deconstructionists have made clear.

"Marrakech" and "Shooting an Elephant" pick up one of Orwell's favorite themes-the deleterious impact of imperialism not just on the colonial peoples but on the rulers. Christopher Hitchens has noted that there is a side of Orwell that is often missed-as the forerunner of post-colonial studies. "Marrakech" begins with one of Orwell's most arresting opening lines: "As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later." It is possible that Orwell borrowed the image from his wife, Eileen, who used a similar phrase in a letter to a friend.

There is a certain disjointed quality to "Marrakech," as if Orwell just cobbled together some thoughts about imperialism. His major theme is the invisibility of the colonized. The Moroccans he sees are the color of the earth. "[W]here the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed."

Orwell ends by watching a parade of Senegalese troops marching by, "their curiously sensitive black faces ... glistening with sweat." As they pass he poses the question that he says every white man must ask himself: "How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?" The Europeans wouldn't have to wait long for their answer.

"Shooting an Elephant" is the essay where Orwell first found his distinctive "voice"-the ability to write a kind of direct, intimate prose that leaves nothing between the writer and the reader. As Orwell says in "Why I Write," good prose is like a window pane: it hides nothing.

When Orwell shoots the elephant, which he knows is no longer dangerous, he recognizes that he is responding to the will of the Burmese mob. "Here I was, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd-seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet ... I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys." No one has ever better described the paradox of the link between the ruler and the ruled.

The three essays "Boys' Weeklies," "The Art of Donald McGill," and "Raffles and Miss Blandish" are among the first attempts to subject to serious analysis such popular culture phenomena as comic post cards, the difference between English and American crime stories, and the reading material of English adolescents. Orwell was always suspicious of the desire of intellectuals to denigrate things that the common people cherished as examples of the trivial and useless. He reverts to this theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four with the coral paperweight and the copy book with rich creamy paper that reminds Winston Smith of the lost past. With these essays Orwell could be considered the creator of the modern thoughtful essay about an otherwise ephemeral theme.

"Charles Dickens" and "Inside the Whale" reveal Orwell's gift for literary criticism. The former is still appreciated by Dickens scholars and remains fresh and vivid today. Orwell told Humphrey House, one of England's leading Dickens scholars, that he never really studied Dickens but "merely read and enjoyed him."

Orwell's insights about things that interested him were always worth noting. Dickens had been dismissed as irrelevant during the crisis of the 1930s as having childish political views. Orwell doesn't dispute this but notes: "I think that because his moral sense was sound he would have been able to find his bearing in any political or economic milieu."

Orwell's Dickens bears a striking resemblance to Orwell himself. When he looked at Dickens, Orwell wrote that he saw the "face of a man who is always fighting against something, ... the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls." In brief, a perfect portrait of Orwell himself.

"Inside the Whale" is Orwell's analysis of the literary trends of the 1920s and 1930s. Using the novelist Henry Miller as an example, it is among other things a defense of the concept of art and the artist even when their social and political views are irresponsible. It is typical of the contrarian side of Orwell that he would find something positive to say about a writer who was largely despised and accused of being little better than a pornographer. "Inside the Whale" also contains an insight into why literary tastes changed from the 1920s generation of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats-who were either apolitical or downright reactionary-to the politically engaged Auden-Spender-C. Day Lewis generation of leftwing radicals of the 1930s. While critically sympathetic to the political views of the latter, Orwell noted that the 1920s writers were technically innovative despite their narrow political views. Few leftwing literary critics would have made the same point then and perhaps now. Orwell's views have been vindicated, as the writers of the 1920s are still seen as innovators while the Auden generation now seems dated.

A Collection of Essays ends with "Why I Write," a short piece in which Orwell discusses four motivations for writing-sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. He believed that the first three motives outweighed the fourth in his makeup, but events of the twentieth century forced him to try to make political writing into an art. It could be argued that in this he succeeded better than any other writer of his generation.

These essays written between 1936 and 1949 foreshadow the world of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell's essays are less well known than these two seminal works of fiction but they are equally important for understanding his world view. The origin of many of themes in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four can be found in these essays: distrust of intellectuals, defense of patriotism as the glue that held the various English classes together, the need for a true socialist revolution, suspicion of communism, respect for themes of popular culture, and concern for the idea of truth.

A Collection of Essays deserves to be read today by all interested in the worrisome issues of state power, how ideology can corrupt, and the way propaganda threatens to undermine the traditional concept of truth in the West. No one spelled out these problems better than Orwell. For those not familiar with his work, A Collection of Essays is a great place to begin.

John P. Rossi is a Professor of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia. He has written extensively on Orwell, most recently "Two Irascible Englishmen: Mr. Waugh and Mr. Orwell," Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, Vol. 47, No. 2, Spring 2005.

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A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. Doubleday, 1952. [Harcourt, 1970] Reviewed by John P. Rossi George Orwell was the greatest essayist of the twentieth century. Sixty years ago, at the height...

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ablo Neruda stands as a giant of 20th-century Spanish language poetry. Renowned for his passionate lyricism, Neruda's poems, particularly his iconic "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair," are infused with vivid imagery and a raw emotional connection. Yet, his talents weren't limited to love sonnets. Neruda explored a remarkable range of styles, from surrealist dreamscapes to historical epics. A keen observer of the natural world, he weaved nature's beauty into his poems, often alongside themes of love and loss. As his life progressed, social and political concerns took center stage, with Neruda's communist ideology and experiences with exile shaping his later works. Despite his stylistic diversity, each of Neruda's collections holds a distinct purpose and resonates deeply with readers worldwide.

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Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. It's a coming-of-age story told through Marji's eyes, a young girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. The black and white panels depict the turmoil of the revolution, the war with Iraq, and Marji's struggles between her family's progressive ideals and the increasingly conservative society. It's a powerful story about history, family, and finding your voice.

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"The Thing Around Your Neck" is a short story collection by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It features twelve interconnected stories that explore themes of immigration, cultural identity, love, and loss. The title story itself follows a Nigerian woman named Akunna who journeys to America with high hopes but faces unexpected challenges.

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'The Applicant' annotation

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Sylvia Plath

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Reluctant Fundamentalist

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Sylvia Plath

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A cheat sheet of literary devices created with the class in order to memorize and understand them more.

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Text

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Walking around annotarions

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The title represents the confusion, and CK's internal conflict and search for her identity. We wanted a title that wouldn't reveal too much about the play because we didn't wan to give the audience a first impression, and wanted them to create their own opinion on the play.

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What was the intention behind making the character queen Victoria?

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What was the intention behind making the character queen Victoria?

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-queen Victoria is a symbolism towards the apartheid and the British colonization in South Africa. In the play we chose to use queen Victoria as a sort of oppressive force towards CK giving allusion towards the historical context. Victoria plays a big part on effecting CK's identity by 'cleansing' her and making her do all these crazy things to be up to her 'white' or 'British standards. A big example of the is Scene 7. page 37 Victoria charges CK for grammatical errors.
In the same scene, page 39, Victoria makes her do a procedure to redeem herself.

QV is a an insight for the audience about CK's internal conflict, she really represent the struggle CK goes to, to find her identity and how internalized her racism is. Because QV is a manifestation of her own subconscious it reflects inner thoughts that CK has whether she's aware of them or not. Because CK grew up in a predominately white environment where her mom was adopted by white people and her Xhosa dad died, she has limited connection to her culture. which she explains in scene 1 page 16

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Internal Oral (Plath, Paper Cut Collective) Research and Notes

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Texts Used, 'Daddy,' and 'Uhm'

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Sylvia Plath 'Daddy,' Paper Cut Collective 'Uhm'

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Sylvia Plath 'Daddy,' Paper Cut Collective 'Uhm'

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Mushroom annotation

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Mirror annotation

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Lady Lazarus annotation