Every Intellectual's Big Brother
Every Intellectual's Big Brother
John Rodden
Copyright Date: 2006
Published by: University of Texas Press
https://doi.org/10.7560/713086
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/713086
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Every Intellectual's Big Brother
Book Description:

George Orwell has been embraced, adopted, and co-opted by everyone from the far left to the neoconservatives. Each succeeding generation of Anglo-American intellectuals has felt compelled to engage the life, work, and cultural afterlife of Orwell, who is considered by many to have been the foremost political writer of the twentieth century.Every Intellectual's Big Brotherexplores the ways in which numerous disparate groups, Orwell's intellectual "siblings," have adapted their views of Orwell to fit their own agendas and how in doing so they have changed our perceptions of Orwell himself. By examining the politics of literary reception as a dimension of cultural history, John Rodden gives us a better understanding of Orwell's unique and enduring role in Anglo-American intellectual life.

In Part One, Rodden opens the book with a section titled "Their Orwell, Left and Right," which focuses on Orwell's reception by several important literary circles of the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Orwell's own contemporaries, Rodden addresses the ways various intellectual groups of the 1950s responded to Orwell. Rodden then moves on in Part Two to what he calls the "Orwell Confraternity Today," those contemporary intellectuals who have, in various ways, identified themselves with or reacted against Orwell. The author concludes by examining how Orwell's status as an object of admiration and detraction has complicated the way in which he has been perceived by readers since his death.

eISBN: 978-0-292-79545-7
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. ix-x)
  4. PROLOGUE: “Orwell” Still Lives
    PROLOGUE: “Orwell” Still Lives (pp. xi-xvi)

    In May 2003, I co-chaired, along with my friend Thomas Cushman, a three-day centenary retrospective on Orwell’s work and heritage titled “George Orwell: An Exploration of His World and Legacy.” The international event was hosted by Wellesley College, near Boston, and it was one of the biggest Orwell gatherings ever held, as close to three hundred participants gathered to discuss the iconoclastic British writer and to ponder how his writings remain pertinent in the twenty-first century.¹

    Our conference took place as the public interest in Orwell’s life, which had peaked in 1984 with a spate of Orwell portraits and teledramas...

  5. INTRODUCTION: George Orwell and His Intellectual Progeny
    INTRODUCTION: George Orwell and His Intellectual Progeny (pp. 1-6)

    George Orwell (1903–1950) was the foremost political writer of the twentieth century and the widely acknowledged contemporary master of plain English prose. The following chapters orbit around Orwell’s intellectual legacy and cultural impact, focusing especially on his deep and ongoing influence on the generations of Anglo-American intellectuals that followed him.

    My chief intention in this study is to explore the politics of Orwell’s reception history as a dimension of cultural history, thereby to understand his unique and enduring role in Anglo-American intellectual life. Orwell’s reception in the mid-to late twentieth century is the subject of Part One of this...

  6. PART ONE Their Orwell, Left and Right
    • CHAPTER ONE “Not One of Us?” Orwell and the London Left of the 1930s and ’40s
      CHAPTER ONE “Not One of Us?” Orwell and the London Left of the 1930s and ’40s (pp. 9-31)

      Historians and social theorists have written extensively about the modern intellectual’s class origins, political allegiances, and social function.¹ Yet, as Charles Kadushin notes, “Despite (or perhaps because of) the many works on intellectuals, there is no adequate sociological theory of intellectuals or intellectual life. . . . Theory-building in this field has been marred by an abundance of opinion and moralization, a dearth of facts, and a plethora of parochial definitions.”²

      Much of the scholarship on the sociology of intellectuals is purely descriptive; and even worse, unlike the case in other subfields of the sociology of occupations, as Robert Brym...

    • CHAPTER TWO “A Moral Genius”: Orwell and the Movement Writers of the 1950s
      CHAPTER TWO “A Moral Genius”: Orwell and the Movement Writers of the 1950s (pp. 33-53)

      Although Orwell’s significance for understanding the London Left of the interwar and wartime era is well-known, it is also true that no British writer has had a greater impact on the Anglo-American generation which came of age in the decade following World War II than George Orwell. His influence was deeply felt by intellectuals from his own and the next generation of all political stripes, including the Marxist Left (Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson), the anarchist Left (George Woodcock, Nicolas Walter), the American liberal-Left (Irving Howe), American neoconservatives (Norman Podhoretz), and the Anglo-American Catholic Right (Christopher Hollis, Russell Kirk).¹

      Perhaps...

    • CHAPTER THREE “London Letter” from a Family Cousin: The New York Intellectuals’ Adoption of Orwell
      CHAPTER THREE “London Letter” from a Family Cousin: The New York Intellectuals’ Adoption of Orwell (pp. 55-73)

      The first two chapters focused exclusively on Orwell’s British reputation. Now we will turn to Orwell’s American reception, attending to the emergence of his reputation in literary New York by the so-called New York Intellectuals. No other group’s reception of Orwell has borne so decisively on the growth and shape of his American and even his international reputation, and for this reason we seek here to contextualize the group’s reception history of Orwell within its rich and complicated intellectual history.

      We are chiefly concerned here with the posthumous response to Orwell within the circle of writers associated with three New...

    • CHAPTER FOUR “A Leftist by Accident?” Orwell and the American Cultural Conservatives
      CHAPTER FOUR “A Leftist by Accident?” Orwell and the American Cultural Conservatives (pp. 75-87)

      Orwell’s rising reputation, especially in the United States in the 1950s, coincided with the birth of American cultural conservatism in its contemporary guise. And indeed the enthusiastic reception accorded to him by American conservatives not only contributed strongly to his Cold Warrior status during the decade but also exerted powerful influence upon American conservatism’s emerging sensibility and direction.

      Chief among Orwell’s admirers on the Right was the scholar-intellectual often credited with having inaugurated early postwar American cultural conservatism, Russell Kirk, who discussed Orwell’s work frequently and at length. This chapter addresses Kirk’s reception of Orwell’s oeuvre, especiallyNineteen Eighty-Four, from...

    • CHAPTER FIVE Does Orwell Matter? Between Fraternity and Fratricide at the Nation
      CHAPTER FIVE Does Orwell Matter? Between Fraternity and Fratricide at the Nation (pp. 89-110)

      George Orwell has long been a subject of contention among the writers of theNation. In the 1940s, theNationand theNew Republicwere the only non-communist American magazines to criticize Orwell sharply. In many respects, the reception of Orwell’s work in theNationmirrored his treatment by theNew Statesman and Nationunder Kingsley Martin throughout the late 1930s and ’40s. Like Martin, several editors of theNationwere quite sympathetic to Stalinism, derided Orwell for his vocal anti-communism, and published mixed reviews ofHomage to CataloniaandAnimal Farm.

      As we shall soon see,Nationstaff writers...

  7. PART TWO Orwell’s Literary Siblings Today
    • CHAPTER SIX Iraq, the Internet, and “the Big O” in 2003: A Centennial Report
      CHAPTER SIX Iraq, the Internet, and “the Big O” in 2003: A Centennial Report (pp. 113-144)

      At the George Orwell Centenary Conference, which was held in May 2003 at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, I had the great pleasure to interview numerous speakers and participants for a documentary film about Orwell’s relevance both to their personal lives and to the twenty-first century. My interviewees cooperated fully, despite some awkward moments with our sound equipment and other inconveniences of the filmmaking process. I found it interesting to converse with them about Orwell’s legacy. In virtually every case, they credit him with exerting a strong formative influence on their thinking—and even leaving a deep imprint on their intellectual lives....

    • CHAPTER SEVEN The Man within the Writings
      CHAPTER SEVEN The Man within the Writings (pp. 145-166)

      Q: What does Orwell still have to say to intellectuals today?

      Richard Kostelanetz: Simply to always see clearly and always tell the truth concisely.

      Richard Rorty: He reminds us how easy it is for intellectuals to become, with the best motives in the world, apologists for tyrannies.

      Anthony Stewart: We can still learn a lot from Orwell about decency, which is a term that he used a lot.Decencyhas become sort of a cliché. Yet especially in a time where people who look like me, who historically have not had access to positions of power and positions of privilege,...

    • CHAPTER EIGHT Unlessons from My Intellectual Big Brother
      CHAPTER EIGHT Unlessons from My Intellectual Big Brother (pp. 167-180)

      Dear George,

      Until you entered my life, I vaguely imagined I would become a professor much like those whom I had admired as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, a specialist in Wordsworth’sPreludeor a scholar who had mastered the minutiae of literary modernism. Your work and legacy have served as my introduction to intellectual life, indeed my passport to contemporary cultural history.

      I am often asked what it was that drew me to you. After all, I’ve been reading and pondering your work for a long time; indeed, I’ve written hundreds of pages about your life and...

  8. EPILOGUE: On the Ethics of Literary Reputation
    EPILOGUE: On the Ethics of Literary Reputation (pp. 181-192)

    On readingAnimal Farm, the poet William Empson, Orwell’s wartime colleague at the BBC and the author ofSeven Types of Ambiguity(1930), wrote him: “You must expect to be ‘misunderstood’ on a large scale.”¹

    Yes—and, as the foregoing scenes of “Orwell and the Intellectuals” demonstrate, he often has been. Empson himself reported that his young son, a supporter of the Conservative Party, was “delighted” withAnimal Farmand considered it “very strong Tory propaganda.”²

    Similar misreadings have occurred withNineteen Eighty-Four—for instance, during the early Cold War era, as I noted in the introduction, the last four...

  9. Notes
    Notes (pp. 193-244)
  10. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 245-248)
  11. Index
    Index (pp. 249-264)
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