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Message: [QUOTE="Michael Wojcik, post: 4222523"] Yes. A number of authors and poets at the time - coming out of the Modernist avant-garde period, High Literary Modernism, and the world wars - were both very interested in language and very concerned with its political ramifications. Besides Orwell you have for example Anthony Burgess and Aldous Huxley. The idea that language had political effectivity was rather in the air at the time, fed by psychoanalysis; structural linguistics anthropological theories like the (somewhat misnamed) "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis"; discussions about art, propaganda, and culture among international Marxists; the work of philosophers such as Heidegger; and so on. But Orwell's is a particularly good example in this area. It's certainly a lot more readable than many of the contemporary philosophical treatments. (I like Derrida just fine, but few people would call _Spectres of Marx_, say, a light read.) [/QUOTE]