George orwell 1903-1950 george orwell was the pseudonym of eric blair, who was born in india, where his father was a British civil servant. He was sent to private school in England, and won a

GEORGE ORWELL
1903-1950
George Orwell was the pseudonym of Eric Blair, who was born in India, where his father was a British civil servant. He was sent to private school in England, and won a scholarship to Eton, the foremost "public school" (i.e., private boarding school) in the country. It was at these schools that he first became conscious of the difference between his own background and the wealthy background of many of his schoolmates. On leaving school he joined the Imperial Police in Burma. His service in Burma from 1922 to 1927 produced a sense of guilt about British colonialism and a feeling that he must make some kind of personal expiation for it. This he would later do with a fiercely anticolonialist novel, Burmese Days (1934), and essays like Shooting an Elephant (1936). He returned to England determined to be a writer and adopted a pseudonym as one way of escaping from the class position in which his birth and education had placed him. He went to Paris to try to make a living by teaching while he made his first attempts at writing. He found he could keep alive in Paris only by taking the most menial jobs, and even then he barely survived. His experience there was followed by a spell as a tramp in England, and both experiences are vividly recorded in his first book. Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Orwell did not have to suffer the dire poverty that he seems to have actually courted (he had influential friends who would have been glad to help him); he wanted, however, to learn about the life of the poor firsthand.
He never joined a political party but regarded himself as a man of the uncommitted and independent left. He tookrart on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936. The book Homage to Catalonia (1938) strongly criticized the Communist part in the civil war and showed from his own experience how the Communist party in Spain was out to destroy Anarchists, Trotskyists, and any others on the Republican side who were suspected of not toeing the Stalinist line; it aroused great indignation on the left in Britain and elsewhere, for leftists believed that they should solidly support the Soviet Union and the Communist party as the natural leaders in the struggle against international fascism.
The so-called socialism established in Soviet Russia was a perversion of socialism and a wicked tyranny. In Animal Farm (1945) he wrote an animal fable showing how such a perversion of socialism could develop. The former is a parable of the reaction which supervenes on all high-minded revolutions: the animals take over the farm on which they have been exploited for the selfish ends of the farmer, but gradually the pigs—ostensibly in the name of democracy—create a dictatorship over the other animals far worse than anything known in the days of human management. The final farm-slogan' All animals are equal, but some are more equal than other—has become one of the bitter catch-phrases of our cynical age.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), when he was an embittered man dying of tuberculosis, he wrote a savagely powerful novel depicting a totalitarian future in England where the government uses the language of socialism to cover a tyranny that systematically destroys the human spirit. In that dark vision of hell on earth, language has become one of the principal instruments of oppression. The Ministry of Truth is there concerned with the transmission of untruth, and the white face of its pyramidal structure proclaims in "Newspeak" the three slogans of the party. "WAR IS PEACE/FREEDOM IS SLAVERY/ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." Three years before Orwell formulated the concept of Newspeak, he had explored in one of his most influential essays. Politics and the English Language (1946), the decay of language and the ways in which it might be checked. The forty years that have passed since it was written have only confirmed the accuracy of its diagnosis and the value of its prescription.Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sick man's prophecy of the future and with its nightmare picture of a totalitarian world it has helped to create a new series of myths. The eternal dictator, Big Brother, the concept of'double-think', the notion of the mutability of the past—these have become common furniture of our minds
It was Orwell's independent innocence of eye that made him both a permanent misfit politically and a brilliantly original writer. He was an outstanding journalist, and the essays he wrote regularly for the left-wing British journal Tribune and other periodicals include some of his best work.
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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
His early novels—especially A.ntic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and Point Counter Point—showed a world without aim or direction (artists, rich people, the Waste Land of post-war London) and offered no solution to the puzzle of a seemingly meaningless existence. Point Counter Point especially seemed to show that man is a creature too mixed, too divided by 'passion and reason' to find much happiness. This book tried certain experiments —several stories going on at the same time, on the analogy of musical counterpoint; the employment of vast scientific knowledge in ironic descriptions of human actions—as though to say, 'Science has no solution either'. In later works he has turned to satire—After Many a Summer, Ape and Essence—and shown little faith in man's capacity to become a more selfless or more rational creature. Huxley's works on mysticism (Grey Eminence, The Devils of Loudun) are learned and interesting, and his essays show him keenly absorbed in the problems of science, art, and civilisation.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-66)
Evelyn Waugh proved himself one of the best modern humorists in his early Decline and Fall and Vile bodies, which, among other things, depicted the empty search for amusement which animated 'bright young people' of the leisured classes after the First World War. A Handful of Dust—perhaps his best work—was a story of the break-up of a marriage, and the consequent destruction of a stability symbolised by one of the old landed estates; it is significant that the hero leaves England, after his wife leaves him, to seek a lost city in the wilds of Brazil. Only in the delirium of fever does he find it, and then it appears as his own abandoned estate.

Graham Greene (1904-1991)
Graham Greene another Catholic convert, has been obsessed with the problem of good and evil, and his books are a curious compound of theology and stark modern realism. Greene sees the spiritual struggle of man against a background of 'seedy' town life (brighton ROCK) or in the Mexican jungle (The Power and the Glory) or in wartime West Africa (The Heart of the Matter). In this last work, and also in the moving The End of the Affair, Greene shows a concern with the paradox of the man or woman who, technically a sinner, is really a saint. Some of his works have conflicted with Catholic orthodoxy (especially in Ireland). The Quiet American, dealing with the Indo-China War, turns to a moral theme—how far are good intentions enough? Greene's lighter novels—'Entertainments', as he calls them—are distinguished by fine construction and admirably terse prose.

William Somerset Maugham
(1874-1965)
He has told good stories, showing himself not unconcerned with the paradoxes in human behaviour, but fundamentally he is the mere observer who refuses to be too deeply involved in humanity. His attitude to morals is a simple Utilitarian one, except that he seems grateful when people behave outrageously, because they thus supply him with a new theme for a story. His alleged masterpiece, Of Human Bondage, is distinguished by frequently clumsy prose and a length which hardly seems justified by the subject. Maugham's wittiest and warmest book—one of the best of the age—is Cakes and Ale, the story of an eminent novelist whose background is not all that his admirers would like. The Razor's Edge dallies with the question of faith, but superficially. Maugham is perhaps best as a writer of short stories—especially about British expatriates in the Far East.

William Golding
(1911-1993)
Without taking a specifically Catholic viewpoint, has been preoccupied with the great absolutes of good and evil in Lord of the Flies (1954), which is about the functioning of original sin among boys wrecked on an island. The Inheritors (1955), which seems to teach that homo sapiens first defined himself in prehistory through his capacity to perform evil, Pincher Martin (1956), with its nightmare image of the soul of a wrecked sailor confronting a God who exposes its wretched emptiness, and Free Fall (1959), which deals with man's capacity to choose either good or evil: his fall from grace cannot be blamed on any deterministic process but only on his open-eyed election of damnation.

The work of Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912-1981) has been regarded ever since her first novel (This Bea Thy Centre, 1935) as distinguished social commentary or comedy, but she began to disclose a concern with the deeper moral problems in novels like An Error of judgment (1962), at the same time practising a taut and astringent soul surgery in The Un speakableS kip ton{ 1958) and Night and Silence I Who is Here? (1963).

The modern British novel owes much to the Irish, and the same may be said of the contemporary French novel, one of whose glories is Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), a Dubliner and friend of James Joyce who elected to write in French and, in works like Molloy and Malone Dies, explores a margin of fiction long neglected—the world of the totally deprived, the rejected of God and man who yet keep alive the spark of human identity Another Irishman, Joyce Gary (1888-1957), is, since his death, finding a place in the great pantheon of original creators, and his works—whether they deal with Africa, as in Mister johnson and Aissa Saved, or the world of the young, as in Charley is my Darling and A House of Children, or, in the great sequence which contains Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim and The Horse's Mouth, with a whole swathe of British social history—are seen to come close to William Blake in their affirmation of the holiness of the human imagination. A third Irishman, Flann O'Brien (1910-66), published a masterpiece—acclaimed as such by Joyce—in 1959, but this still awaits the general recognition that is its due The book is At Swim- Two-Birds and, with lesser novels like The Hard Life and The Da/key Archive, it is unique in its experimental power, its lightly carried learning, its fusing of fantasy and Irish realism.

The period since 1950 has seen the flowering of the roman fleuve in England—the long novel-sequence which makes obeisance to Marcel Proust's in a series of books which may be read as separate entities but gradually reveal themselves as a single unified conception, human society in a state of change Anthony Powell (1905-) has been working on The Music of Time since 1951, when A Question of Upbringing appeared, and the whole emergent sequence, with its portrait of that area of British life where the bohemian and aristocratic conjoin, promises to be a great novel hardly inferior to Proust's in respect of the variety of its characters, its wit, and its recreation of a whole society С. P. Snow (1905-) has at last completed his long sequence Strangers and Brothers, with its pictures of an England painfully trying to adjust itself to social change, war, the new horrors of science, new concepts of moral responsibility Seen from the viewpoint of a public man of obscure origins, but the two sequences together form a remarkable and enlightening synoptic picture of the history of our own times To these two river-novels must be added the long autobiographical Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight by Henry Williamson (1895-1977), strangely neglected but, in its old fashioned way, compelling and moving.
Younger women novelists include Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) who, in such early works as Under the Net, The Sandcastle and The Bell, disclosed a capacity for blending naturalism and symbolism and touching on complex, almost marticulable, psychological states A Severed Head (1961), which has not been well understood though it has been dramatised and even filmed, seemed to flirt with structuralism, combining the characters in sexual patterns of a purely cerebral nature.

Лекция №2

British postmodernist novel in the context of culture.

"Modernity" is that period - nearly a century - beginning well before WW2 and ending well after it, in which science established facts, political theory established the social state, secularism overcame religious opinion, and the notion of shame was denied or explained away with various social conventions. It was an era dominated by the thought of Freud and Marx. Its tendency was toward the legitimacy of the social welfare state.
"Post Modern" embraces a period from about 1980 to the present, characterized by the emergence of the postindustrial information economy, replacing the previous classes of aristocracy, middle class, and working class with the new paradigm: information elite, middle class, and underclass. The phrase also implies a nation-state challenged by new world views: feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, etc; old scientific certainties called into question; the replacement of mechanical metaphors with cybernetic ones.
Postmodernism rejects the modernist ideals of rationality, virility, artistic genius, and individualism, in favor of being anti-capitalist, contemptuous of traditional morality, and committed to radical egalitarianism. The most recent feature of PostModernism is the rise of Political Correctness and the attempt to purge dissenting opinion from the ranks of the academic/artistic/professional brahmin caste, together with a systematic attack on excellence in all fields. Post Modernism is an anti-Enlightenment position wherein adherents believe that what has gone before, as "Modernism", is inappropriately dependent on Reason, Rationalism, and Wisdom, and is, furthermore, inherently elitist, non-multicultural and therefore oppressive.
Finding fertile ground in academic departments of literature (particularly literary criticism), art history, and sociology - and more recently in history and political "science", its origin can be traced to the French academy of the 1970's whose proponents are now called "deconstructionists", the essence of which is that in any literary creation (any "text"), the actual meaning of the screed is to be found in the reader, not in the author. That is to say, it is futile to try and know what an author meant by what is written, but what you Can know is what you interpret from what you have read and That becomes the true meaning. A Text, the postmodernist insists, is "ultimately self-contradictory". (Except, of course, the texts written By postmodernists!)
In the sense that the Enlightenment encapsulated an acquired series of rational observations into Truths, and then wove those Truths into a coherent philosophy of the world, general laws which apply to it, and the consequences of such laws to its inhabitants, the postmodernists reject the notion that anything can be resolved to be True. Everything is in the mind of the beholder: relative, forever shifting; and anything perceived to be a "fact" is the mere disillusionment of a cultural bias. With such a philosophy, adherents can move beyond the critique of books to the critique of anything, even science, about which they tend to be supremely ignorant. But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King, and in postmodernism, the man in best possession of obscurantist jargonism is Professor and Chairman of the Department.
Postmodernism is the unifying philosophy of the academic left which has replaced discredited Marxism. It might also be claimed that Marxism has morphed into postmodernism. Like all academic foolishness, it has an argot of jargon, tropes and incoherent phraseology recapitulated continuously by the cognoscenti. It distills, ultimately, to mere posturing as a substitute for intellectual fervor. Although nothing, according to the postmodernist, can be determined to be "true", postmodernism itself is, of course, True.
Paying homage at the postmodernist altar are all sorts of new academic disciplines, chief of which are "women's studies", "black studies", and "interdisciplinary studies", and an assortment of nutty crusades such as campus Political Correctness and even environmental wackiness: look at "global warming" for example - the greatest Hoax in human history. Nothing is True, and the Believer worships at that altar. These are the truly disenchanted: coagulated in the academy after having been rejected in the real world, they continue their search for a nihilistic nirvana. Such an outlook nirvana took the specific conceptual and structural forms in fiction which are the follows:
1. Whereas Modernism places faith in the ideas, values, beliefs, culture, and norms of the West, Postmodernism rejects Western values and beliefs as only a small part of the human experience and often rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture, and norms.
2. Whereas Modernism attempts to reveal profound truths of experience and life, Postmodernism is suspicious of being "profound" because such ideas are based on one particular Western value systems.
3. Whereas Modernism attempts to find depth and interior meaning beneath the surface of objects and events, Postmodernism prefers to dwell on the exterior image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects and events.
4. Whereas Modernism focused on central themes and a united vision in a particular piece of literature, Postmodernism sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, discontinuous, "jagged," with no one specific reality possible. Therefore, it focuses on a vision of a contradictory, fragmented, ambiguous, indeterminate, unfinished, "jagged" world.
5. Whereas Modern authors guide and control the reader’s response to their work, the Postmodern writer creates an "open" work in which the reader must supply his own connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide his own (unguided) interpretation.
English postmodern novel, like, probably, none of the other European literatures, is rooted in national culture and customs. It’s full of peculiar British sense of humor that may sometimes show itself in the very absurd forms. Englishmen enjoy the play of passion, sudden turnaround of events and dispute, clever impact on their emotions. These novels contain a lot of concepts, that are not represented directly, but British readers perceive and decipher them easily. Native English reader would at once recognize the signs, placed or hidden by authors, and the same signs may pass unnoticed by foreign readers.
One of the English writers remarked that “everything in our country boils down to the class affiliation”. She was surely exaggerating; the notion of class lacks former definite character, and problems, related to it, do not excite the society as much as they did thirty years ago. But at the same time that writer is fully right asserting the fact that many modern writers take the affiliation to certain class as a starting point in developing other, commonly encountered problems and challenges.
Such an approach is very clearly seen in the novel Nice work, 1990 by David Lodge, where a conflict of values, typical to academic and business circles of society is represented. A British government program designed to foster mutual understanding between the academy and the outside world ends up doing (strangely enough) exactly what it intends.
The author begins his narration with the flood of scenes which demonstrate the abysm of class distinctions between two protagonists. An executive director of an engineering firm and a young university scientist who intends to investigate the specific of his work are set at the centre of the plot. Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer in English literature at the university, is assigned to "shadow" Vic Wilcox, who runs a factory. Robyn's temporary status makes her at once vulnerable to receiving such an undesirable assignment and consumed by the quest for a tenured position somewhere – "nice work if you can get it," as they say, and hence the title. Her fashionable leftist world view leaves her completely unprepared for the everyday realities of Vic's occupation. The clash of ideologies and lifestyles is deftly drawn and delightful to read.
Robyn Penrose is paid very humble sum, but this does not bother the heroine, for she keeps loving her small and not heated enough house, all stuck with books and old furniture. Robyn sports fashionable boots, and wears rather worn out leather bag that she would change for nothing. Sometimes the heroine may even afford herself a one day journey. And she would never agree to alter her way of living or place of work to gain false prosperity.
The work of an executive director is highly paid and gives Vic Wilcox the possibility to spend money to purchase a new house equipped with rich furniture and electronic appliances. Vic Wilcox himself, his family and environment treat these things as very valuable. He and his colleagues all came from a working class and unconditional evidence of success for them is the possibility to buy everything they need how expensive that could turn out. The protagonist sometimes casts doubts on such philosophy; his inborn belief in discipline and in necessity to live by one’s own labor doesn’t conform to the golden tabs in a bath room, his wife is proud so much.
As the plot develops the reader meets another heroine. She's a financial expert from City. That young, uneducated lady possesses the very quick witted character trait to estimate “each charted course on the byway”. At the same time she doesn’t have the least concern about the problems of education, philosophy, social responsibility, traditions or future. She lives by one day and the current moment and could selfishly purchase any thing that attracted her attention. That young lady represents the group or class of modern British society, which’s only interested in material world so that other aspects of human life may be mindlessly scarified before the considerable sum of money. This group is rather small, but author treats it as a very dangerous one.
David Lodge makes the class and philosophical issues involved about as accessible as they could possibly be, and thus manages to say something useful and bright on the subject of human consciousness. Similar emphasis on characters reactions and deeds is made through entire novel to reveal other characters class or group affiliation.
The same basic approach is realized in the novel Headlong (1999) of Michael Frayn. The conflict here is build upon the world outlook differences between the representative of landlord class and university teacher’s class. Michael Frayn's Headlong begins with Martin Clay, a philosopher taking time off to write a book about art, travelling to the country with his art-historian wife and infant daughter, there to work in quiet and seclusion on the book he has not quite managed to really get started. Once in the country they are invited to the run-down estate of their neighbors, the Churts. Tony Churt, always on the lookout for a way to make a quick bit of cash, has an ulterior motive in asking them over, wanting the Clays to have a look at some old paintings that he wants to unload. He doesn't trust the big auction houses (given recent charges against Sotheby's and Christie's he seems less paranoid than Frayn means him to appear), and hopes the Clays can give him a fair idea of their worth -- and perhaps a way of selling them. There is a huge and quite ghastly Giordano, two minor Dutch scenes, and then one more -- kept in the chimney since it fits just right and "those bloody birds in the chimney keep bringing the soot down."
The last picture is -- so Clay believes -- a missing masterpiece by Pieter Bruegel. He doesn't tell the Charts what he believes it is (and how much it would be worth), and begins hatching a devious plan to bring the picture into his own possession (from where he at least says he plans to pass it on to a museum). Stumbling headlong along Clay investigates the possibility that the painting is what he believes, and tries to figure out how to get Churt to part with it without arousing his suspicion. Clay puts considerable pressure on his marriage when he immediately pops back off to London to research the painting but, at least for a while, keeps his wife on his side. Tony Churt also proves to be considerably more devious than initially thought -- he is dodging taxmen left and right, and there are perhaps some doubts as to whether the paintings are actually his to sell. Tony's wife Laura takes too great an interest in Clay, causing further complications.
Finally, all adds up to the collision, that an impoverished English landlord seeks means to avoid the sale of his patrimony, his cloths are old-fashioned and worn out and the car’s going to break apart. Tony Churt hates poverty; he tries, though unsuccessfully, to gain some money, but deep in his heart he believes, the native land and mansion could not convert an article of trade. The university professor has enough money to afford him a cottage house (an analog to our dacha) - small, damp and cold house in a village. A cottage house in England is a rather humble and not expensive building made from local construction materials, it’s often surrounded by a tidy and clean garden. Martin Clay’s family spends summer months there. The professor is sure that philosophy, history of art may coexist with damp children clothes and somewhat cold rooms, and he would categorically deny the proposal to buy a big luxury house with its ugly inspiration killing esthetic.
Much of the book and poor Clay's attempts to get the paintings plays out as a pleasant little farce, a bit simple at times but entertaining nevertheless. Alongside this are, however, Clay's serious considerations as to why the painting might be a missing Bruegel. The painter's life is examined in depth, as is the horrible Dutch history of that time, and the circumstances that might have led to the disappearance of this particular work. Frayn handles this very well, and these digressions entertain as much as the actual contemporary storyline. The theories and ideas and history make for fascinating reading -- but they do not necessarily meld ideally with the rest of the story. There is a bit much art history and mystery for what is otherwise a relatively light plot.
In the most recent, Spies, won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction in 2002 Michael Freyn starts the story with an elderly man, Stephen Wheatley,who reminisces about his life during the Second World War. He wanders down the now modernised London cul-de-sac where he and his close friend Keith Hayward had grown up. Michael Freyn rigorously sets the characters according to their class affiliation. The Hayward’s occupy the highest step, their son would rule the actions of the “lower” protagonist and the father being the example for other families. In that remote London area there was very little evidence of the Second World War, but the two friends suspect that the inhabitants of the Close are not what they seem. Keith authoritatively informs the trusting Stephen, the whole district is riddled with secret passages and underground laboratories. Then one day Keith announces an even more disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family. Through a series of extended flashbacks we learn about as they started spying on the Keith's mother, convinced that she was an agent of the Nazis. As the story slowly unfolds, the reader learns how this seemingly innocent childhood game subtly exposes a slew of dark secrets that reverberate down the years. The children find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for.
The narrative style of Spies, as of the many others postmodernism novels (remember the mentioned Waterland, What a Carve Up) takes on the form of a bildungsroman. A bildungsroman tells about the growing up or coming of age of a sensitive person who is looking for answers and experience. The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest son going out in the world to seek his fortune. Usually in the beginning of the story there is an emotional loss which makes the protagonist leave on his journey. In a bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually and with difficulty. The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and he is ultimately accepted into society – the protagonist’s mistakes and disappointments are over. In some works, the protagonist is able to reach out and help others after having achieved maturity.
When one asks young people in Russia what they are going to achieve in their life, they would often reply – to earn much money. When one asks why, the typical answer is - to buy a lot of goods. The thorough reading of modern English novels would probably help young people in the post Soviet countries to understand that such the reply seems senseless in the context of English culture. Englishmen used to live in the society, where people earn and spend money according to the particular class or group scale of values. The comicality of two novels comes up from the mutual misunderstanding or simply wrong understanding of the other group customs and properties. The heart of the matter is that the lifestyle depends not only on one’s personal choice. Class affiliation has left its mark on each character. And authors use these marks as one of the key instruments to reveal characters’ personal treats and outlook.
Despite class affiliation post modern novel focuses on some other peculiar national motives. For example, authors write not about the whole country, but about the limited aria of the country, they know well. Each region or place has its own particular treats, whether it a part of a city or of a rural settlement. Landscape, architecture and history merge here into the symbolical native land; a person should love and care about. The region predetermines characters’ activities and occupation: water lock keeping, houses trading, and researches in history etc. In all novels heroes go somewhere but do not come to and often return to their dearest locality.
The concrete piece of art often serves as a starting point of the action and through the entire plot plays the role of a lantern which casts the light on the crucial scenes or conflicts.
Modern British postmodern fiction may be built up on different analogies in such a large measure, that a novel’s structure approximates to a crossword. Such a method helps authors to weave symbolical threads between nowadays and the very rich in events history of Britain. This, in turn, reveals and develops the philosophical background and idea of the work. Despite, English reader traditionally gets great pleasure of finding analogies and connections between concepts.
Other motives which almost obligatory run through British novel are: scripturalism which may go hand in hand with religious skepticism, tolerance of other people's views, readiness to make fun of national myths, disapproval of theories and of blur general conclusions.
And the last, but not the least motif states that one should consider different sides of life with a great deal of humor. Comicality as one of the dominant mood of the postmodern novels is, probably, the most typical from the obvious features of the last. Humor could overgrow into grotesque as in What a Carve Up!, or it could gain intellectual character as in Headlong, or become lyrical as in Nice Work. Any reader, born outside the Isles must remember that Englishmen see the world with a sense of restrained irony. Perhaps particularly this quality helps them to obtain the measured assessment concerning any, even the most absurd situation, and prevents them from constructing the unique and total truth.

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