EN 1700 Lecture Notes - Know Thyself, Totalitarianism, Media Culture
Document Summary
Know thyself and become a better writer. Politics is about how society is organized and who has power. You start to develop a political identity when you ask how you fit into a society (worker, ethnicity, consumer, sex ) Who has the power: financial, military, legal, political, the ability to fully participate in society. An icon is somebody or something widely and uncritically admired, whose symbolism is now fixed. When ideas become iconic, they become cultural clich s. The icons meaning can be satirized, but the original association remains. Setting and themes have been borrowed to come to represent different things that orwell has not intended. Orwell as icon: big brother is watching you. 194 as a book of political genre dystopian fiction. Genre a grouping of text with similar distinct and reoccurring patterns and writing. Orwell is no different; it is important to understand his context so that his preferred reading is clearly transmitted.
