| The dissertation analyzes relationships between the formal properties of Orwell's texts and the ideologies which these texts produce. Throughout, the main formal category is the genre of naturalism, which is shown to be related to ideologies of pettybourgeois radicalism, empiricist epistemology, and centered subjectivity. Some effort is made also to relate this entire literary and ideological problematic to the historical realities of Orwell's time and to Orwell's mode of biographical insertion into those realities.;Chapter One concentrates on the construction of Orwellian naturalism in the early work, and leans heavily on both an Althusserian theory of ideology and Lukacs's descriptions of naturalism, realism, and modernism. Chapter Two discusses nonfictional naturalism in The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, and makes use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to analyze Orwell's presentation of the authorial persona. Chapter Three focuses on the intervention of programmatic satire against naturalism in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Conclusion and Autocritique" suggests how certain theoretical problems implicitly raised in the dissertation might be pursued beyond the limits of the dissertation itself. |
