What Orwell Didn't Know
, by Szanto, Andras
- ISBN: 9781586485603 | 1586485601
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 11/6/2007
Propaganda. Manipulation. Spin. Control. It has ever been thusor has it? On the eve of the 60th anniversary of George Orwell's classic essay on propaganda (Politics and the English Language), writers have been invited to explore what Orwell didn'tor couldn'tknow. Their responses, framed in pithy, focused essays, range far and wide: from the effect of television and computing, to the vast expansion of knowledge about how our brains respond to symbolic messages, to the merger of journalism and entertainment, to lessons learned during and after a half-century of totalitarianism. Together, they paint a portrait of a political culture in which propaganda and mind control are alive and well (albeit in forms and places that would have surprised Orwell). The pieces in this anthology sound alarm bells about the manipulation and misinformation in today's politics, and offer guideposts for a journalism attuned to Orwellian tendencies in the 21st century.
| Editor's Note | p. ix |
| Introduction: Follies of Orthodoxy | p. xvii |
| Language and Politics | |
| Orwell Then and Now | p. 3 |
| The Limits of Language | p. 9 |
| Words in a Time of War: On Rhetoric, Truth, and Power | p. 16 |
| An Egregious Collocation of Vocables | p. 37 |
| Freedom, Liberty, and Rights: Three Cautionary Tales | p. 49 |
| Sloppiness and the English Language | p. 57 |
| Symbols and Battlegrounds | |
| What Orwell Didn't Know About the Brain, the Mind, and Language | p. 67 |
| The New Frontier: The Instruments of Emotion | p. 75 |
| Stellar Spin | p. 87 |
| Bad Knowledge | p. 97 |
| Black and White, or Gray: A Polish Conundrum | p. 110 |
| After the Falwellians | p. 122 |
| Media and Message | |
| Welcome to the Infotainment Freak Show | p. 137 |
| Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Heat, Nor Gloom of Night Will Stay the Couriers from the Swift Completion of Their Appointed Rounds-but What About Big Media? | p. 147 |
| Reporters and Rhetoric | p. 158 |
| Lessons from the War Zone | p. 166 |
| Our Own Thought Police | p. 174 |
| Epilogue: What I Didn't Know: Open Society Reconsidered | p. 187 |
| Politics and the English Language | p. 205 |
| Notes | p. 223 |
| Author Biographies | p. 231 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
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