The Political Imagination of Cormac Mccarthy

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

The Political Imagination of Cormac Mccarthy Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2016 The olitP ical Imagination of Cormac McCarthy Drew Kennedy Thompson Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Thompson, Drew Kennedy, "The oP litical Imagination of Cormac McCarthy" (2016). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4394. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4394 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION OF CORMAC MCCARTHY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Political Science by Drew Kennedy Thompson B.S., Murray State University, 2004 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2009 May 2017 ©Copyright 2017 Drew Kennedy Thompson All rights reserved ii Acknowledgements This dissertation represents the final step in my journey toward my doctoral degree and the completion of my matriculation at Louisiana State University. Given the length of that journey, I am somewhat daunted by the prospect of acknowledging all those who have contributed in some way or another in bringing me to this moment. I would like to acknowledge the LSU Department of Political Science for academic and financial support over the course of my tenure. In particular, I would like to thank Ms. Tara Chustz Landry for her caring attention, making sure I met administrative deadlines and for being there to chat whenever I dropped in. Her warm and friendly presence was a source of comfort during my early years of learning the ropes. I would thank also Ms. Katherine Surek and Ms. Judith Robertson for taking over and filling this same role in later years. I have benefitted also from the willingness of Professors James R. Stoner, Jr., and William C. Clark as department chairs, who have allowed me to support myself through teaching over the years and provided an example of how to be a good boss and mentor. Instrumental in shaping my development as a scholar have been Professors Wayne Parent, Ellis Sandoz, and James R. Stoner, Jr., who have all served on my committees over the years. To them I owe a large debt of gratitude for their guidance and instruction. Whether in seminar, guided readings courses, or casual hallway conversation, they have each been great sources of wisdom, levity, and occasional tough love. I regard them as shining examples of what it is to be a professor. They are a credit to their institution and profession, and I will miss seeing them on a weekly basis. iii I must also acknowledge my friends, old and new. I will begin with the old. While I began to rely on the patience and good humor of Amy Ladley early on in my graduate career, it was not until she completed her doctorate at LSU and moved away four years ago that I began to realize the value of our bond. True friendship can withstand distance, and Amy remains my “first call” whenever I reach moments of indecision in work or in life. Every ready, ever steady, ever witty: Amy’s support as a colleague, editor, and friend has been instrumental in completing this dissertation. She has read every page of it, solving problems I could not see, and assuring me I could do it when my resolve waivered. Friends like Amy don’t come along often in life and this dissertation has improved immeasurably by her involvement. Though less directly involved, I must also express my appreciation to my LSU and political science colleagues: Omar Khalid, Trevor Shelley, Eric Schmidt, Jacob Seigler, Luke Thompson, and others, who were there for conversation and commiseration when wanted or needed. To my Cajun friends in Lafayette: Jonathan and Mikhaela Melançon, Jason Crosby, Adam Cormier, Christian LeJeune, and Alan LaFleur, who brought music back into my life at a time it was sorely missing, and showed me the Louisiana I had been searching for. To my Baton Rouge friends: the triumvirs Keller, Norman, and Qadri; Jason Schroeder and Kelly Kyle; and to new friends Mike Treadwell and Lydia Dorsey, with best wishes for their upcoming marriage; the Drunk Monks trivia team and salon, with particular gratitude to Michel Guidry and James Long; and lastly to the great musicians of Baton Rouge, who very gracefully allowed me to join in their playing and singing; I extend my warmest thanks. To my long-abiding old friends back home in Murray, Kentucky: Brach Crider, Michael and Jessica Flinn; the families Duncan, Hart, and Haverstock; and to Bob Taylor and Debbie Toon, for being there to support me during prolonged research on holidays back home. Finally, to my extended families, Kennedy and iv Thompson, who have never doubted the merit of what I was up to for so long, even if I’ve never been completely able to explain to them precisely what that is. And now for the new friends. For anyone who has gotten to know me over the past five years, my dissertation has hovered in the background like a dysfunctional marriage. And while this Cormac McCarthy fellow must have often seemed like a brutal and capricious taskmaster that I went home to every night, there is one who has known me from the beginning of the affair. Indeed, at our first introduction—and much to the chagrin of our dates that evening—Zack Godshall and I spoke at great length about our mutual love of McCarthy’s prose. Over the tumultuous years to follow, Zack has been a willing and invaluable confidante, and in Jillian Hall he has definitely found a more accommodating “date.” In his thoughtful way he has managed to keep the mystery and romance of the subject matter alive while helping me stay focused, working through the instrumental requirements of the project. Further, it was through my friendship with Zack that I met Brad Pope, Esq., who was to round out our trio. To the Mayor of State Street, as I call him to his annoyance, I am grateful for enumerable conversations on music, politics, and the intrinsic merits of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Any fellow is lucky to name Zack and Brad as his friends, and I count myself the most fortunate of all. I can say only that, in ways they know and in ways they do not, I could not have made it to this point without them. Delivering my “baby” has not been the only labor of love in the past five years. The Thompson family has grown and, if anything, it was the arrival of my niece Molly that brought some needed perspective for me during a critical period. Similarly, the arrival of my nephew Jack this past year coincided with a growing desire in me to put more of my focus on life’s more rewarding enterprises. My sister Chelsee and brother-in-law Tony have always been good v examples for me. But seeing them as parents, I am continually awed and humbled by the people they have become. I could not have achieved this milestone (or any other, for that matter) without the love and support of my parents, Tony and Krista Thompson. The completion of this degree is a testament to that love, for it was only by their steadfast commitment to honoring a promise made long ago that I could ever have made it. True to their word, they saw me through to the end. Though I can never repay them, I hope that in some small way this document may serve as a small testament to the gratitude I feel to them. Had it not been for the willingness of Professor Cecil Eubanks to take me on as a special case after a calamitous first year of graduate school, I would have had to give up on my dream. What he regarded as merely doing his job was, for me, a lone beacon of hope when all seemed lost. Since then we have worked together in a variety of professional contexts and I have profited immensely from his influence. His enthusiasm for this project has often been all that sustained it. Like any great mentor, he has found ways to poke, prod, and provoke me along my way these past ten years, and always in a manner that made it seem like my big discoveries were my own, though I know better. Wherever my professional journey leads from here, I can say without hesitation that I have had the benefit of observing up-close a true master of his calling. He has my unending admiration, gratitude, and love. Finally, it remains only for me to pay tribute to Dana Statton, the love of my life. Everything about our relationship has been unexpected: from the chanciest of meetings, to the beginning of a life together in my hometown. Though I have had a fantastic support network during this process, to Dana fell the duty that, ultimately, no one else could do: to love me in spite of myself, to believe in me when I told her she was making a mistake, and to trust me even vi when I thought I was lost. On long evening walks we have hashed out every argument in this dissertation. Together. She has been instrumental in the writing of every page, and I could never have found a better collaborator for this project.
Recommended publications
  • Political Fiction Or Fiction About Politics. How to Operationalize a Fluid Genre in the Interwar Romanian Literature
    ȘTEFAN FIRICĂ POLITICAL FICTION OR FICTION ABOUT POLITICS. HOW TO OPERATIONALIZE A FLUID GENRE IN THE INTERWAR ROMANIAN LITERATURE What’s in a Genre? A reader of contemporary genre theories is compelled to conclude that, one way or another, the idea of literary class has managed a narrow escape from obsolescence. Conceptual maximalism fell behind the pragmatic call to respond to a global cultural environment for which the task of grouping, structuring, organizing, labelling remains vital for a long list of reasons, of which marketing policies are not to be forgotten. The modern story of the field has seen many twists and turns. After some theories of genre evolutionism – derived more or less from Darwinism – consumed their heyday in the 1890s–1920s1, Bakhtin (1937) took a decisive step toward a “historical poetics”, before Wellek, Warren (1948), Northrop Frye (1957), and Käte Hamburger (1957), and, later on, Gérard Genette (1979), Alastair Fowler (1982), or Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1989) returned to self- styled mixtures of formalism and historicism2. The study which pushed forward the scholarship in the field was, surprisingly or not, a fierce deconstruction of the “madness of the genre”, perceived as a self- defeating theory and practice of classification, highly necessary and utterly impossible at the same time. In his usual paradoxical manner, Derrida (1980) construes the relationship between the individual work and its set as one of 1 See, for instance: Ferdinand Brunetière, L’évolution des genres dans l’histoire de la littérature, Paris, Hachette, 1890–1892; Albert Thibaudet, Le liseur de romans, Paris, G. Crès et Cie, 1925; Viktor Shklovsky, O теории прозы [On the Theory of Prose], Москва, Издательств o “Федерация”, 1925.
    [Show full text]
  • Utopia, Myth, and Narrative
    Utopia, Myth, and Narrative Christopher YORKE (University of Glasgow) I: Introduction [I]n the 1920s and 1930s…Fascist theorists…adapting the language of Georges Sorel, grandiloquently proclaimed the superiority of their own creative myths as ‘dynamic realities,’ spontaneous utterances of authentic desires, over the utopias, which they dismissed as hollow rationalist constructs.1 - Frank and Fritzie Manuel We have created a myth, this myth is a belief, a noble enthusiasm; it does not need to be reality, it is a striving and a hope, belief and courage. Our myth is the nation, the great nation which we want to make into a concrete reality for ourselves.2 - Benito Mussolini, October 1922; from speech given before the ‘March on Rome’ One of the most historically recent and damaging blows to the reputation of utopianism came from its association with the totalitarian regimes of Hitler’s Third Reich and Mussolini’s Fascist party in World War II and the prewar era. Being an apologist for utopianism, it seemed to some, was tantamount to being an apologist for Nazism and all of its concomitant horrors. The fantasy principle of utopia was viewed as irretrievably bound up with the irrationalism of modern dictatorship. While these conclusions are somewhat understandable given the broad strokes that definitions of utopia are typically painted with, I will show in this paper that the link between the mythos of fascism and the constructs of utopianism results from an unfortunate conflation at the theoretical level. The irrationalism of any mass ethos and the rationalism of the thoughtful utopian planner are, indeed, completely at odds with each other.
    [Show full text]
  • 226 Jacques Ranciére the Politics of Literature. Cambridge
    Philosophy in Review XXXIII (2013), no. 3 Jacques Ranciére The Politics of Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press 2011. 224 pages $69.95 (cloth ISBN 978–0–7456–4530–8); $24.95 (paper ISBN 978–0– 7456–4531–5) The Brothers Karamazov is not only a superb novel but contains theological and philosophical material which arouses (holy) envy even in the most charitable theologian and philosopher. As a title, Jacques Ranciére’s The Politics of Literature can espouse a similar type of envy. While one should not judge a book by its cover (or title), it was those four words that drew me to the work and the opportunity to review it. Unlike the Jewish people who were said to accept the Torah before God even articulated its parameters (“we will do and we will obey”), I should have inquired and investigated more first before doing anything. Ranciére’s work is a collection of ten nebulously linked, previously published essays translated from the French by Julie Rose (the French collection was published in 2006). The title of the book is also the title of its first chapter. The essay (and book) opens: “The politics of literature is not the same thing as the politics of writers. It does not concern the personal engagements of writers in the social or political struggles of their times. Neither does it concern the way writers represent social structures, political movements or various identities in their books” (3). Sadly, it was precisely in hope of further examining those elements that attracted me to the work. As I am a theologian espousing postcolonial, liberation, and feminist approaches to texts, drawing upon my literary background and developing work in ethics and politics, I can only be candid in acknowledging that it was a rocky beginning for this reviewer, to say the least.
    [Show full text]
  • Politics in Fictional Entertainment: an Empirical Classification of Movies and TV Series
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by OPUS Augsburg International Journal of Communication 9(2015), 1563–1587 1932–8036/20150005 Politics in Fictional Entertainment: An Empirical Classification of Movies and TV Series CHRISTIANE EILDERS CORDULA NITSCH University of Duesseldorf, Germany This article presents conceptual considerations on the classification of TV series and movies according to their political references and introduces an empirical approach for measuring the constituent features. We argue that political representations in fiction vary along two dimensions: political intensity and degree of realism. These dimensions encompass four indicators relating to characters, places, themes, and time. The indicators were coded for a sample of 98 TV series and 114 movies. Cluster analyses showed four clusters of TV series and six clusters of movies. Nonpolitical fiction, thrillers, and fantasy were central types in both TV series and movies. Movies, however, stand out through a greater diversity and a focus on the past that is reflected in three additional types. Based on the identification of different types of movies and TV series, three directions for theory building are suggested. Keywords: fictional entertainment, TV series, movies, classification, political intensity, degree of realism As the lines between information and entertainment become increasingly blurred, scholarly attention is not only directed to entertainment features in information programs but extends to information in entertainment programs. The latter especially regards the pictures of reality that are constructed in the respective programs. Attention is directed to both the identification of such pictures and the assessment of their possible effects.
    [Show full text]
  • The Sunset Limited Press Release
    588 Sutter Street #318 San Francisco, CA 94102 415.677.9596 fax 415.677.9597 www.sfplayhouse.org PRESS RELEASE VENUE: 533 Sutter Street, @ Powell For immediate release Contact: Susi Damilano August, 2010 [email protected] West Coast Premiere of THE SUNSET LIMITED By Cormac McCarthy Directed by Bill English September 28 through November 6th Press Opening: October 2nd San Francisco, CA (August 2010) - The SF Playhouse (Bill English, Artistic Director; Susi Damilano, Producing Director) are thrilled to announce casting for the West Coast Premiere of The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy which opens their eighth season. “The theme of the 2010-2011 season is ‘Why Theatre?”, remarked English. “Why do we do theatre? How does theatre serve our community?” Each of our selections for our eighth season will give a different answer to these questions. Based on the belief that mankind created theatre to serve a spiritual need in our community, our riskiest and most challenging season yet will ask us to face mankind’s deepest mysteries. We open the season with one of the most powerful writers of our time, Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, The Road, No Country for Old Men). The play, billed as “a novel in play form” brings us into a startling encounter on a New York subway platform which leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where they engage in a brilliant verbal duel on a subject no less compelling than the meaning of life. TV and film star Carl Lumbly (Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Alias, Cagney & Lacey) returns to the SF Playhouse to reunite with local favorite Charles Dean (White Christmas, Awake and Sing!) after having performed together in Berkeley Rep’s 1997 production of Macbeth.
    [Show full text]
  • A Translation Autopsy of Cormac Mccarthy's The
    A TRANSLATION AUTOPSY OF CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE SUNSET LIMITED IN SPANISH: LITERARY AND FILM CODA Michael Scott Doyle [T]he translation is not the work, but a path toward the work. —José Ortega y Gasset, “The Misery and Splendor of Translation,” 109 We now have the personal word of the author’s to be transformed into a personal word of the trans- lator’s. As always with translation, this calls for a choice among synonyms. —Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, 12–13 Glossary of the Codes Used S1 = the first Spanish TLT version to be analyzed = Y1,theliterary translation-in-progress S2 = the second Spanish TLT version to be analyzed = Y2, the final, published literary translation S3 = the third Spanish TLT version to be analyzed = the movie subtitles S4 = the fourth Spanish TLT version to be analyzed = the movie dubbing SLT-E = Source Language Text English (Translation from English) SLT-X = Source Language Text in X Language (Translation from Language X) TLT = Target Language Text TLT-S = Target Language Text Spanish (translation into Spanish) Y1 = Biopsy Stage of a Translation = the Translation-in-Progress (in the Process of Being Translated) Y2 = Autopsy Stage of a Translation = the Final Published Translation (Post-process of the Act of Translating, an Outcome of Y1) Introduction: From Biopsy to Autopsy The literary translation criticism undertaken in the Sendebar article “A Translation Biopsy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited in Spanish: Shadowing the Re-creative Process” antici- pates a postmortem
    [Show full text]
  • “Constructed on No Known Paradigm”: Novelistic Form and the Southern City in Cormac Mccarthy’S Suttree
    “Constructed on no known paradigm”: Novelistic Form and the Southern City in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree Andrew James Dykstal Bachelor of Arts, Hillsdale College, 2013 A thesis presented to the graduate faculty of the University of Virginia in candidacy for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English University of Virginia April 2017 Dykstal 1 This thesis is dedicated to my peers and teachers at UVA and Hillsdale College, with particular bows to Jerry McGann—my thesis director—and to Michael Levenson, both mentors whose patience, encouragement, and graceful professionalism have shaped my thinking and my aspirations; to Fred and Carol Langley and the members of the American Legion whose generosity made possible my graduate education; and to my grandfather Cornelius Dykstal, who departed the world on the day I completed this project and whose wry humor and dignity throughout the twilight of his years embody the qualities back cover blurbs are always insisting I ought to find in Cormac McCarthy’s books. I would also like to thank friends who read drafts and housemates who tolerated my sometimes excessive monopolization of the kitchen table. Their days of eating breakfast amid unreasonable stacks of books have at long last come to a close. Dykstal 2 “Like their counterparts in northern cities, business leaders in the New South came to acknowledge the social disorder of their cities as regrettable byproducts of the very urban-industrial world they had championed. Drunkenness, prostitution, disease, poverty, crime, and political corruption were all understood as symptoms of the moral and physical chaos the lower classes fell into in the modern city….It was the instinctive reaction of the business class to respond with efforts to bring order to the urban world they inhabited.” —Don H.
    [Show full text]
  • Dystopian Novels: a Warning Or an Instruction Manual
    Dystopian novels: A warning or an instruction manual Kordić, Ivan Master's thesis / Diplomski rad 2012 Degree Grantor / Ustanova koja je dodijelila akademski / stručni stupanj: Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences / Sveučilište Josipa Jurja Strossmayera u Osijeku, Filozofski fakultet Permanent link / Trajna poveznica: https://urn.nsk.hr/urn:nbn:hr:142:538084 Rights / Prava: In copyright Download date / Datum preuzimanja: 2021-09-30 Repository / Repozitorij: FFOS-repository - Repository of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Osijek SVEUČILIŠTE JOSIPA JURJA STROSSMAYERA U OSIJEKU FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET Ivan Kordić DYSTOPIAN NOVELS – A WARNING OR AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL Diplomski rad Mentor: doc.dr.sc. Sanja Runtić Osijek, 2012. ABSTRACT Although the dystopian idea has been present in literature for over two thousand years, not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the dystopian literature become appreciated as an important cultural force. Dystopia found its roots in science fiction, but it has also blossomed in political fiction, and became a separate literary genre, following the developments of the first half of the twentieth century. The dystopian authors became social critics who examine the political practice of the world society. Two of the most important representatives of twentieth-century dystopian fiction -- George Orwell and Aldous Huxley -- both explored future states of their societies. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) George Orwell wanted to inform English society about the emerging political systems such as Bolsheviks or the Nazis. Orwell´s aim was to satirize the emerging vanity and popularity of governments. Huxley´s Brave New World (1931) portrayed a world where human beings were produced like clones and conditioned with artificial happiness through a never-ending variety of pleasures and seductions.
    [Show full text]
  • Surveillance Society in Dystopian Novels and Contemporary Society
    The Representation of Surveillance Society in Dystopian Novels and Contemporary Society Emilie Kaleta Ida Johanne Skall Sørensen AALBORG UNIVERSITET Abstract This thesis examines the representation of surveillance and totalitarian societies in the dystopian novels 1984 (1949), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and The Circle (2013), from three different decades throughout history. This representation will be investigated through the Power/Knowledge scheme as presented by Michel Foucault as well as Fredric Jameson’s theory of The Political Unconscious. This thesis analyses the hegemonic ideologies imposed by totalitarian regimes as an attempt to create docile, conformed bodies that further allows the regime to sustain and maintain its power over society. Furthermore, the thesis analyses the correlation between the political and historical circumstances that not only played a prominent role at the time of the novels’ publication, but also in contemporary society, which enters into the notion that dystopian novels often function as cautionary warnings. The findings of the analyses are thought-provoking when considering the parallels that exist in relation to contemporary surveillance societies and their application of technological devices through which the government interferes and limits the private life of its citizens. This is especially applicable to the global pandemic of COVID-19, where the notion of surveillance and its usability is greatly discussed. The conclusion to be drawn is that surveillance societies and totalitarian systems are utilised
    [Show full text]
  • INTRODUCTION MARTIN GRIFFIN and CHRISTOPHER HEBERT
    INTRODUCTION MARTIN GRIFFIN and CHRISTOPHER HEBERT tories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience aims at re- Spairing the lines of communication between, on the one hand, the critical approach in literary and cultural studies that sees all fction as political in the sense of embodying a set of covert ideological assumptions; and, on the other hand, the perspective that regards political fction, poetry, and drama as a valid and often popular subgenre of literature that needs some examination, espe- cially in the context of a highly polarized society such as the United States in the early twenty-frst century. A prose narrative or poem or flm about politics is one type of exercise in the dimensions of meaning that the imagination can give to political experiences. But a political fction can also be a story about how applied political rhetoric is itself built around structured narratives and images. For instance, in the special edition of American Literary History dedi- cated to “Writing the Presidency,” John Michael examines John F. Kennedy’s timely “political self-invention,” through his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profles in Courage, as an “embodiment of manly vigor and heroic courage” (424, 430). Kennedy’s clever gambit, recovering past senatorial biographies in order to burnish his own by association, ultimately helped the young poli- tician inspire supporters and win election. More recently we witnessed the “swift-boating” of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, which turned the narrative of his service with the US Navy in the Vietnam War into something problematic, even damaging, contributing to his defeat.
    [Show full text]
  • The Southern Literary Influences of Cormac Mccarthy and How They
    Brandeis University Waltham Massachusetts Department of English Myth, Legend, Dust: The Southern Literary Influences of Cormac McCarthy and How They Portend the Evening Redness in the West Benjamin Rui-Lin Fong Advisor: John Burt A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brandeis University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English May 2018 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor and mentor, the bardic John Burt, who was my first English professor at Brandeis and whose intellectual guidance and comments have helped shape every part of this thesis. Professor Burt’s Southern Literature course led to my first encounter with Blood Meridian. His lecture on Milton’s Satan and Judge Holden inspired this three-year obsession with Cormac McCarthy. I would like to thank Jerome Tharaud who has been a particularly inspirational professor and mentor whose guidance, enthusiasm, and instruction sparked my love for American literature. He has been particularly helpful in his advice on balancing thesis work and my applications to graduate school. I would like to thank Kurt Cavender who encouraged a UWS student to take more English classes (and who spent his own time to nominate me for an award). I would like to thank Pu Wang whose lectures on tragedy and modernity inspired me to pursue the Knoxville portions of this thesis. Lastly, I would like to thank Emma Smith. Our talks about Shakespeare have stayed in my mind, and Shakespeare’s language, stories, and characters come to mind every day. Finally, I would like to thank my family, whose love and support have spanned continents.
    [Show full text]
  • We Love Big Brother: an Analysis of the Relationship Between Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Modern Politics in the United S
    University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Honors Scholar Theses Honors Scholar Program Spring 5-4-2018 We Love Big Brother: An Analysis of the Relationship between Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty- Four And Modern Politics in the United States and Europe Edward Pankowski [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Political Theory Commons Recommended Citation Pankowski, Edward, "We Love Big Brother: An Analysis of the Relationship between Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four And Modern Politics in the United States and Europe" (2018). Honors Scholar Theses. 559. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses/559 We Love Big Brother: An Analysis of the Relationship between Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four And Modern Politics in the United States and Europe By Edward Pankowski Professor Jennifer Sterling-Folker Thesis Adviser: Professor Sarah Winter 5/4/2018 POLS 4497W Abstract: In recent months since the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States in November 2016, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has seen a resurgence in sales, and terms invented by Orwell or brought about by his work, such as “Orwellian,” have re- entered the popular discourse. This is not a new phenomenon, however, as Nineteen Eighty-Four has had a unique impact on each of the generations that have read it, and the impact has stretched across racial, ethnic, political, and gender lines. This thesis project will examine the critical, popular, and scholarly reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four since its publication 1949. Reviewers’ and commentators’ references common ideas, themes, and settings from the novel will be tracked using narrative theory concepts in order to map out an understanding of how the interpretations of the novel changed over time relative to major events in both American and Pankowski 1 world history.
    [Show full text]