Library Person
George Orwell
English writer; Nineteen Eighty-Four's Newspeak made language control and the rewriting of memory a working political mechanism.
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903–1950) drew on his own experience of wartime propaganda — at the BBC and in Spain — to build 1984 (1949), a dystopia in which a state-controlled language, Newspeak, is engineered to make certain thoughts literally unformulable, and the past is continuously rewritten to match present political need. “Newspeak,” “doublethink,” and “Big Brother” passed from the novel into ordinary English as working descriptions of language used to constrain thought rather than express it.
Works in the Library
George Orwell BOOK 1949
Orwell's dystopia — included for its treatment of language as an instrument of control.
MEMORY LANGUAGE
