Connection To Other Works
Readers can observe Orwell's preoccupation with language in protagonist Gordon Comstock's dislike of advertising slogans in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, an early work of Orwell's. This preoccupation is also visible in Homage to Catalonia, and continued as an underlying theme of Orwell's work for the years after World War II.
A perfect example of this development is the way the themes in "Politics and the English Language" anticipate Orwell's development of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One analyst, Michael Shelden, calls Newspeak "the perfect language for a society of bad writers (like those Orwell describes in "Politics and the English Language") because it reduces the number of choices available to them." Developing themes Orwell began exploring in this essay, Newspeak first corrupts writers morally, then politically, "since it allows writers to cheat themselves and their readers with ready-made prose."
Read more about this topic: Politics And The English Language
Famous quotes containing the words connection and/or works:
“We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Evil is something you recognise immediately you see it: it works through charm.”
—Brian Masters (b. 1939)