“How could you tell how much of it was lies?” The controversy of truth in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

This article considers the controversial nature of truth in George Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four, both within the novel itself and in critical responses to it. It suggests a new account of the nature of the control exercised by the Party and the resultant schizophrenia induced by "doublethink"; the Party imposes two different and competing attitudes to truth on the people of Oceania. These might be described as "truth-committed" and "non truth-committed" attitudes (Routledge and Chapman 2003). When we are free to choose between these two attitudes, both can form part of our everyday, non-pathological encounters. The non truth-committed approach is typical of encounters with literary texts, and this article argues that such an approach can enable the reader to dispense with too strong a concern for the factual veracity of Orwell's apparent predictions, and to concentrate on the literary qualities of his novel.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Big Brother Watch’s Stop Covid Passes Campaign

“…The danger of surveillance technology and the fear of surveillance state are also sentiments reflected in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. As the main concepts, which have been deemed as "predictions" or "prophecy" (Chapman, 2009) by some scholars and critics, are drawn into reality by Big Brother Watch, the novel becomes an effective tool for them to lay out their agenda. Furthermore, their recontextualisation of the novel for Stop Covid Passes campaign can be seen as relevant because Snowden's revelations in 2013 show that that the U.K. is a mass surveillance regime that uses surveillance technologies to violate human rights (Amnesty International, 2021).…”

2012 Quebec Student Protests

“…Once again, it is not chiefly through self-illusion that the subject's crisis of rationality is disarmed, but through self-deception, through what we might call, as Sartre did, "mauvaise foi" (bad faith), acceptance of which is primarily a way of discharging one's blame with respect to oneself rather than with respect to anyone else, since bad faith towards another assumes in any case bad faith towards oneself, which is to say, selfdeception. This bad faith is grounds for not only the capacity to maintain incompatible thoughts, but to believe them to be true just at the opportune moment (Chapman, 2009;Martin, 1984;Nelkin, 2002). That is specifically what the circumstances command when we are under the yoke of a brutal form of authority -it is a question of survival.…”

The year’s work in stylistics 2009

“…In the journals, stand-out articles on the stylistics of prose fiction included Siobhan Chapman's discussion of the nature of truth in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (Chapman, 2009). This article is very much an extension of her work on the philosophy of language and follows up on the distinction between truth committed and non-truth committed attitudes (see Routledge and Chapman, 2003).…”

“…These terms refer to the notion of truth as being (i) ontologically distinct from lies, and (ii) a lack of concern for the distinction between truth and falsity. Chapman (2009) argues that in 1984 the characters of Winston and Julia are representative of these two positions respectively, and that these two perspectives also explain critical disagreement about the novel. According to Chapman, a non-truth committed appraisal of the novel allows the critic to overlook the veracity (or otherwise) of Orwell's predictions of the future, in order to appreciate the novel as a piece of literary art.…”