George Orwell - Language 2n by Lucia Belen CARRETERO https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89 Let's research this extremely interesting author. We'll analyze together his acclaimed 1984, let's find out what made him write that novel. en-us 2020-06-17 15:17:04 UTC 2026-06-09 22:31:06 UTC hello@padlet.com https://padlet.net/icons/png/270d.png George Orwell's real name was Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell was his pen name). cgiannotti3 https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/638895127 He is a renowned English writer who lived during the first half of the 20's century. His work is characterized by his biting social criticism and his opposition to totalitarism. 
His work was so influential in political and popular culture that nowadays we still use terms which were invented by him. For example: "big brother", "thought police", "two minutes hate", "room 101", "memory hole", "newspeak", "doublethink", "proles", "unperson" and "toughtcrime". Moreover, the adjective "Orwellian" is used to describe totalitarian and authoritarian social practices.]]> 2020-06-24 15:23:46 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/638895127 George Orwell https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/638917880 He was born in 1903 in India. His father was a British official in the Indian civil service, and his mother was French. His family then returned to England, where he went to a boarding school and then recievd scholarships for Wellington and Eaton. After graduating school he went back to India to follow his family's tradition and worked in Burma in the Imperial Police, but he always knew he wanted to become a writer. When working in the police he realized how much the people from Burma hated the british rule and felt ashamed of his role in the Police, which lead him to his resignation and he started to focus on improving his writing skills. After publishing several books int the 30's that gave him recognition, in 1945 he published Animal Farm, inpired in Stalin's totalitarism, which made him even more famous. Then in 1949 he published 1984. The novel is inspired in Nazism and Stalinism and it's set in a distopian future in which the world is governed by three totalitarian states.
Carolina Frati
https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Orwell/Animal-Farm-and-Nineteen-Eighty-four]]> 2020-06-24 15:41:44 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/638917880 1984 https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639010757 Many of the influences behind George Orwell's 1984 came more or less directly from his own life experiences:

Orwell developed a strong aversion to class distinctions during his time at Crossgates, and from his work in Burma's police force. What you were able to achieve and how highly you were regarded depended "not only on what you did but on what you were”. This caste system appears in 1984 as a scalding critique of the party system. 

From his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell gained a lasting sense of the futility and horror of armed conflicts in which neither army can - or is willing to - defeat the other.

Another powerful connection between Orwell's experience in Spain and the militaristic strategy in 1984 comes from the betrayal that Orwell's militia faced in 1937. Here, the militia to which Orwell belonged was abruptly and unjustly labelled traitorous. Its members were rounded up, jailed, and, in many cases, killed. The reason for this betrayal was purely strategic. This reality is mirrored in 1984.
Sofia Kaminskii
]]> 2020-06-24 17:05:44 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639010757 George Orwell and his essays https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639033154 George Orwell was a novelist, essayist and critic. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism. To support himself, Orwell wrote numerous essays and reviews over the years, developing a reputation for producing well-crafted literary criticism.

Essays by George Orwell
‘Politics and the English Language’
Published in April 1946, this essay is considered one of Orwell’s most important works on style. Orwell believed that "ugly and inaccurate" English enabled oppressive ideology and that vague or meaningless language was meant to hide the truth. He argued that language should not naturally evolve over time but should be “an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.” To write well is to be able to think clearly and engage in political discourse, he wrote, as he rallied against cliches, dying metaphors and pretentious or meaningless language.
‘Shooting an Elephant’
This essay, published in 1936, discusses Orwell’s time as a police officer in Burma, which was still a British colony at the time. Orwell hated his job and thought imperialism was “an evil thing;” as a representative of imperialism, he was disliked by locals. One day, although he didn’t think it necessary, he killed a working elephant in front of a crowd of locals just “to avoid looking a fool.” The essay was later the title piece in a collection of Orwell’s essays, published in 1950, which included ‘My Country Right or Left,’ ‘How the Poor Die’ and ‘Such, Such were the Joys.’ 

Azul Rodríguez
]]> 2020-06-24 17:28:06 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639033154 1984: Context and main influences mculacciatimuinos https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639302898
 Context --- Regimes:
 
  • 1930s Stalin's Great Purge and Totalitarian Government: secret police, tortures, disappearances and public records destroyed. Battle against fascists and destructiveness.
  • Adolf Hitler Nazi´s Party: concentration camps, victims, ‘NON-PERSONS’ erased
  • WW2

Orwell supported socialism (he believed in 'Ethical Socialism').
1984 is an anti totalitarian novel. The political system of the novel 'INGSOC' (English Socialism) shows England’s vulnerability towards totalitarianism.
 
]]> 2020-06-24 22:17:49 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639302898 Fun facts cfranchino https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639313676 - He once got himself arrested on purpose:
In 1931, while investigating poverty for his aforementioned memoir, Orwell intentionally got himself arrested for being “drunk and incapable.” This was done “in order to get a taste of prison and to bring himself closer to the tramps and small-time villains with whom he mingled,”

-He knew seven foreign languages:
Orwell wrote in a 1944 newspaper column, “In my life I have learned seven foreign languages, including two dead ones, and out of those seven I retain only one, and that not brilliantly.”

-He voluntarily fought in the Spanish Civil War:
At the age of 33, Orwell arrived in Spain, shortly after fighting had broken out in 1936, hoping to write some newspaper articles. Instead, he ended up joining the Republican militia to “fight fascism” because “it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” The following year, he was shot in the neck by a sniper, but survived.

-His manuscript of Animal Farm was nearly destroyed by a bomb.
In 1944, Orwell’s home at 10 Mortimer Crescent in London was struck by a “doodlebug” (a German V-1 flying bomb). Orwell, his wife Eileen, and their son Richard Horatio were away at the time, but their home was demolished. During his lunch break at the British newspaper Tribune, Orwell would return to the foundation where his home once stood and sift through the rubble in search of his books and papers—most importantly, the manuscript for Animal Farm. “He spent hours and hours rifling through rubbish. Fortunately, he found it,” Richard recalled in a 2012 interview with Ham & High. Orwell then piled everything into a wheelbarrow and carted it back to his office.

-He coined the term "Cold War":
The first recorded usage of the phrase “cold war” in reference to relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union can be traced back to Orwell’s 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, which was written two months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the essay, he described “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.”

-He ratted out Charlie Chaplin and other artists for allegedly being communists:
Orwell’s intention was to blacklist those individuals, whom he considered untrustworthy, from IRD employment. While journalist Alexander Cockburn labeled Orwell a “snitch,” biographer Bernard Crick wrote, “He wasn’t denouncing these people as subversives. He was denouncing them as unsuitable for counter-intelligence operation.”

]]> 2020-06-24 22:33:50 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639313676 George Orwell's Illnesses Influenced '1984' https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639342143
George Orwell´s illnesses: tuberculosis and infertility, also suffered multiple bouts of bronchitis and other respiratory ailments. He had several episodes of bacterial pneumonia, contracted dengue fever and was a heavy smoker.  Orwell suffered fits of coughing from a condition called bronchiectasis.

His health worsened significantly just as he was working on the first draft of "1984".

He wrote 1984 while dying of tuberculosis and later on he was succumbed by the disease.

-Eugenia Rios.]]> 2020-06-24 23:17:49 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639342143 More interesting facts https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639373610
-He Willingly Lived a Life of Poverty in Paris, and One of a Tramp in London—But Help Wasn’t Far Away

 He wanted to write about the lives of the underdogs, and decided that the only way to do that is to become one of them. In Paris he washed dishes, and in London he became a tramp–all the while talking to people in actual poverty.

-He Held Various Other Odd Jobs Before Becoming a Full Time Author

 He became a tutor to a disabled boy and then a teacher at the Hawthorns High School for boys for a few semesters. After that he became a teacher at Frays College in Uxbridge. Upon moving to London he worked part-time at Booklovers’ Corner at South Green in Hampstead.
 He got his first major writing assignment checking out miners in the impoverished north of England.

 -He Finally Met Ernest Hemmingway
 It always seemed that he and Hemmingway were in the same places at the same time, but never met. Hemmingway also fought a bit in the Spanish Civil War, and had lived in Paris the same time Orwell had (of course they didn’t run in the same circles).

-Writing Nineteen Eighty-Four Was a Grueling Process For Orwell
 The book isn’t that long, and is shorter than some of his older books. But it took forever to write. He first began writing it in 1946, but was bogged down by reviews and articles for newspapers. He had wanted to finish it in the summer of 1947, but didn’t get it done. Due to his advancing illness with tuberculosis, the book took longer and longer to write. The book had originally started being set in 1980, then 1982, and finally 1984 as the writing process dragged on. He spent most of 1948 typing out the final manuscript, sometimes being forced to type it out while in bed.
 The original title was The Last Man In Europe. But his publishers, Secker & Warburg, thought that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a better title.

-Fausto Rossi

]]> 2020-06-25 00:10:55 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639373610 https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639977121 George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, (born June 25, 1903, Morihari, Benegal, India— died January 21, 1950, London, England), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the latter a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule. He was born into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to English, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and won scholarships to two of England´s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalism. The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states.

 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Orwell/Animal-Farm-and-Nineteen-Eighty-four

-Ana Bouquet
]]> 2020-06-25 13:21:19 UTC https://padlet.com/lb_carretero/bhet4wy2wrccvw89/wish/639977121