Past Present Prophecy

AY2019/2020 Semester 2

From the first Apple Macintosh advert (which featured the tag line `why 1984 won't be like 1984') to Wikileaks (via Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to death), in popular cultural cameos from David Bowie's Diamond Dogs to Haruki Murakami 1Q84, 1984 seems to be everywhere. In this course you'll explore the transformations of George Orwell's touchstone novel and this broader, mobile idea. To test out these ideas and to understand the shifting cultural contexts of `1984' as a metaphorical prism, we will focus on both the real events of 1984 (when Orwell's work was purportedly to have come true) as well as anticipations of an Orwellian future from the 1970s to the present day. By weaving together art history, literature, media, politics, technology and social activism, we will bring increasingly staid debates about postmodernism, mediatisation and the Cold War (another term coined by Orwell) back to critical life. This interdisciplinary course asks you to think both as a literary critic and cultural historian in order to reevalute this overdetermined juncture of modern life.