ge Blog Post #4 — George Orwell
Blog Post #4
George Orwell, an English novelist and essayist, journalist, and a critic, has been recognized for his work of totalitarianism, awareness to social injustice, and his poetry, fiction and journalism that remains still influential to popular culture today.
He was born in 1903 and died at the age of 46, January 21, 1950. Known as George Orwell, but his real name, Eric Arthur Blair, is most famous for his novel Animal Farm. I remember reading animal farm in middle school, I would say 8th grade if I remember. Studying and analyzing this term “totalitarianism.” Which at the time, I felt too young to understand, but I remember the hours we spent as a class talking about Orwell and his precise ways in his writings, his personification, his poetic writing about political power.
I chose George Orwell because though I am not familiar to many journalists being a graphic design major, I remember George Orwell being an author growing up that I spend a lot of time in classroom discussions for, rereading his writings and taking a paragraph and being able to pick it apart for a three hour class session.
George Orwell being of years before our time, still has literature being sold and read and studied in colleges and schools. His literature is one of popular culture and it is something that he chose to do in order to make political writing into an art. He chose to write because he wanted to look at difficult subjects of our world. For example, totalitarianism, a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state, he chose to portray that through the life on a farm and farm animals in one of his popular novels.
Through researching and studying George Orwell I hope to understand more of what his novels meant to him and what he gained out of writing them. I wish to learn more about his background and if he was always a political person, or if fiction was ever in his desires.
I think I am drawn to Orwell because his way of writing reminds me of how I learn. It’s not usual that I can be handed a difficult subject or topic and understand it off the bat, normally I have to break it down, or relate it metaphorically to something that I already understand.
