Political and Cultural Perceptions of George Orwell: British and American Views

ISBN-13: 9781349952533 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 186 str.

Ian Williams

Spis treści

Introduction: Orwell: Good or Ungood?.......................................................................................... 2

Section 1......................................................................................................................................... 9

Chapter I     In Defense of Comrade Psmith: the Orwellian treatment of Orwell............................... 9

Chapter II The Orwellian Method.................................................................................................. 21

Chapter III Orwell the Socialist...................................................................................................... 25

Chapter IV Tangential Criticisms................................................................................................... 34

Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 35

Section 2 -In Memoriam- retrospective views.......................................................................... 38

Chapter V   Orwell's Own Airstrip One in 2014............................................................................... 38

Chapter VI  The Persistence of Pessimism, Oceania 20 years after Nineteen Eighty-Four............... 42

Chapter VII Afterlife of An Atheist................................................................................................ 46

Section 3 Beyond the Telescreen – Snitching, Snooping and Surveillance............................ 62

Chapter VIII No bother about Big Brother...................................................................................... 62

Chapter IX  Alexander Cockburn and "Snitching"........................................................................... 67

Chapter X The List......................................................................................................................... 73

"The List".................................................................................................................................. 77

Section 4 What Is Left?................................................................................................................ 82

Chapter XI Disabusing Idiocy? Orwell & the Left............................................................................ 82

Chapter XII  Orwell and the Democratic Left.................................................................................. 84

Chapter XIII Striking Back at the Empire......................................................................................... 90

Interlude..................................................................................................................................... 106

Chapter XIV  Revolution Is No Tea Party but It's Easier in a Salon: Reading the Leaves Afterwards 106

Chapter XV Orwell and the Left in the United States –the Under-reported side of Oceania!........ 114

Chapter XVI Letters to Oceania?.................................................................................................. 139

Chapter XVII Irving Howe, Orwell’s Prophet in the USA............................................................... 143

Section 6  Cover Bards – Hitchens the Orwell Emulator And His Detractors............................. 158

Chapter XVIII Orwell's Lives........................................................................................................ 158

Chapter XIX Why Hitchens Matters............................................................................................. 164

Chapter XX Christopher Hitchens and Orwell.............................................................................. 171

Chapter XXI Antithesis Incarnate: Christopher Hitchens, A Retrospective Glance......................... 173

Chapter XXII Hitchens and the Iraq War....................................................................................... 183

Chapter XXIII Truth in Journalism................................................................................................ 190

Selected Bibliography................................................................................................................ 194

Notes............................................................................................................................................... 2

O autorze

Ian Williams is Assistant Professor at Bard College Center for Global & International Affairs, USA. He is author of six other books on politics and history and speaks on international affairs and American foreign policy at venues and on media across the world.

Blurb

This book analyzes George Orwell’s politics and their reception across both sides of the Atlantic. It considers Orwell’s place in the politics of his native Britain and his reception in the USA, where he has had some of his most fervent emulators, exegetists, and detractors. Written by an ex “teenage Maoist” from Liverpool, UK, who now lives and writes in New York, the book points out how often the different strands of opinion derive from “ancestral” ideological struggles within the Communist/Trotskyist movement in the 30’s, and how these often overlook or indeed consciously ignore the indigenous British politics and sociology that did so much to influence Orwell’s political and literary development.  It examines in the modern era what Orwell did in his–the seductions of simplistic and absolutist ideologies for some intellectuals, especially in their reactions to Orwell himself.