On The Political Unconscious In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four

Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of George Orwell’s masterpieces. Critics at home and abroad have made a rich research on it from the angle of society and history, aesthetics, and psychology etc. However, those who have studied it from the angle of linguistic structure are far away from enough. With the guidance of Fredric Jameson’s Marxism literary criticism and Greimas semiotic square, this thesis has analyzed the significance and role of the deep structure of the text, and reveals the paradox of author’s " political unconscious" which is at once radical and conservative.The first chapter establishes four Greimas squares to show the deep structure of the text. It analyzes the ruling logic of totalitarianism, including the subversion of cognitive model, ruin of spiritual state, deconstruction of humanity and subversion of power source. It reveals the author’s radical attitude toward totalitarianism. Chapter two analyzes the relationship among all the elements in the deep structure of the text, and to show how author denied all the possible alternatives to totalitarianism from within. It explores author’s conservative deconstruction of totalitarian mechanism. Chapter three explores the formation of Orwell’s"political unconscious" in terms of his " lower-upper-middle class" identity, his faith in system, the tradition of political writer and the influence of social trend.Through the method of Greimas square developed by Marxist Jameson, this thesis at once appreciates the narrative strategy of Orwell and explores his political unconscious, revealing the craftsmanship and profundity of Nineteen Eighty-Four.