Wednesday 2 December 2009

1984

This lecture I found to be incredibly interesting from an English students perspective, because although books produce emotion within readers through emotive language I never considered it a form of manipulation before; which programmes the reader to feel a certain way or be persuaded to see something from the writers point of view.

I also felt this connected well to the lecture on Freudian philosophy for example writers manipulate language to express their views and insecurities, which shows some evidence according to Freud of people dealing with core issues through language, as that is what makes up their thought processes and shapes their ideologies. Projection is the term I would associate with this form of manipulation, just a reminder for those who have forgotten, projection is a way of dealing with a core issue a sort of defense mechanism which causes the subject to push their issues onto others in order to deal with it themselves and make others feel equally bad. This is the term I would use because the reader is having to endure the projection of ideas by reading a text which results in manipulation, as their perspective may be changed after reading that text.

In addition I felt this novel connected really well with Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' as the reference of using language to programme and control people's behaviour is a prominent theme in Huxley's novel. For example by playing certain things to children in their sleep and banning literature and art, anything which would encourage people to think for themselves and manipulate them to think differently which in the novel was considered dangerous. It also has communist undertones as well which is shown through the worker's alienation towards the products they have forged. Therefore these two novels share certain parallels which I would recommend other people take a look at.

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