Orwell Practice Essay

The Essays of George Orwell are a personal anthropological and cultural artifact, serving as authorial cathartic metalanguage that is ‘essentially communicative’ of omnipresent themes [John Donne, Metatempsychosis, 1601]. Such are indicative in ‘Why I write?’, ‘Writers and Levithan’ and ‘Politics and the English Language’, which are perpetually and contemporaneously relevant through Freudian ‘Ontological Pastiche of Experience’, as changing milieus offer new interpretations, producing continual fascination evidenced through Jungian conception of ‘collective unconscious’. Textual accessibility is forged through probing at political reflections, through reading perspectives, concerning the moral erotesis representative of his oeuvre, ‘for how is political writing art?’ [George Orwell, Polemic, March 1984]. Through his skillful manipulation and use of form, Orwell highlights his concern pertaining to the misuse of language amongst writers, to achieve political agendas. Such is indicative of his context, through influence to Jingoism, intelligentsia, and democratic socialism, as ‘all knowledge of cultural reality is always knowledge from particular points of view’ (Weber, 1949, p.81).

The essays of George Orwell are the artifacts of comprehensive contextual influences, representing to the responder the composers concern regarding the power of language. Orwell articulates that language has the capacity to shape ones sense of reality, conceal truths and even manipulate history. This concern for the misuse of language was particularly pertinent in light of his context, where the political upheaval throughout and following the Second World War, shaped the course of politics in modern history. During this period, Europe witnessed the rise and fall of totalitarian governments in Germany, Italy and Spain, as well as the spread of communism throughout the Cold War. Orwell acknowledged that the subject matter of a writer ‘will be determined by the age he lives in’, which he