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Utopianism Parodied in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty‐Four . An Intertextual Reading of the ‘Goldstein Treatise’
Author(s) -
Dalvai Marion
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2010.00991.x
Subject(s) - intertextuality , narrative , manifesto , philosophy , reading (process) , literature , realism , focus (optics) , theme (computing) , brother , epistemology , art , sociology , law , linguistics , physics , optics , political science , computer science , operating system , anthropology
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism , attributed to Big Brother’s arch‐enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, is the book‐in‐book in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty‐Four . Along with the appendix, it provides the reader with a theoretical and philosophical framework that complements the narrative. First I point out the importance of Goldstein’s tract on an intratextual level; then my focus shifts towards its intertextuality with influential works of European intellectual history, such as Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848), Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) and Burnham’s Managerial Revolution (1941). Bringing into focus the myriad of perspectives that result from the intra‐, inter‐ and extratextual layers in the text, the article shows that the treatise is the ultimate example of Orwell’s distinctive fusion of realism and satire.