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Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage |
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| Composition 2
English 1102 |
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Your Statement of Research Interest
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Orwell's 1984 is a novel rich in ideas; people from all walks of life with a wide variety of experiences and viewpoints have found much to admire and think about in his work. In fact, it is an interesting testament to his wide appeal that Orwell is often quoted and championed by both liberal and conservative thinkers and writers alike. The possible topics that you could choose are wide in scope: the novel itself covers everything from religion and psychology to politics and criminal justice.
Irving Howe's edition of the novel has more than two score of suggested topics for papers in the appendix at the end, and over the years, students themselves have added several more. The novel is expansive enough so that no matter what your interests may be, history, law, psychology, sociology, family, child rearing, politics, psychology, religion, cults, Nazism, Communism, Hitler, Stalin, authoritarianism, South Africa and apartheid, or literature and language, there is probably something in the novel to spark your interests. The following list is a collection of favorite topics from students of yore:
- Mind Control, doublethink
- advertising as mind control, e.g., military recuitment advertisements, tobacco, etc.
- television as propaganda spreading official information leading to mind control
- alcohol/substances as mind control
- cults of personality and other religious cults
- Stockholm syndrome
- Milgram's Obedience to Authority
- Zimbardo's "Standford Prision Experiments"
- Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance
- Newspeak
- officialese
- weasel words
- advertising
- Doublespeak
- political discourse
- trends in contemporary journalism (see censorship below too)
- Sexual Repression, Sexism, and Pornography as Mind Control
- Orwell as a (non-)sexist author
- notice the effects of 'free speech' and 'free press' in the USSR after Gorbachev: a boom of pornography
- Literary Topics
- utopias, dystopia, and antiutopias
- heroes and antiheroes
- the role of guilt in Smith's character development
- the religious allusions in the novel
- comparisons to Animal Farm, Brave New World, 1985, The Time Machine, We, The Handmaid's Tale, The Giver, and others
- autobiographical origins of 1984
- the relationship between Orwell's politics and his art
- Censorship
- "This will not be another Viet Nam": how the military handled the media in the Gulf wars
- If you can't beat 'em, embed 'em: co-opting the media during war
- Aljazeera vs. Fox News: who has the memory hole?
- "All the news that we see fit to print": corporate ownership of the US media
- the great (cyber) wall of China: control of the internet in mainland China and elsewhere
- Propaganda
- how journalism and the media served/failed this country after 9/11 and during the lead-up to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
- fear and loathing: how to coerce people with fear, prejudice, and blatant nationalism, manipulating them to do what you want
- the Bush administration's justifications for invading Iraq
- the Bush administration's efforts at Public Diplomacy, e.g., exporting democracy, Karen Hughes, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, etc.
- Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" speech and the CIA Leak Scandal
- propaganda in North Korea
- propaganda in Nazi Germany
- propaganda and the "red scare"
- Invasion of Privacy and/or Prior Restraint
- the loss of civil liberties during "war,"e.g., the PATRIOT Act, martial law
- 1984 as a warning about how governments can use fear to erode civil liberties
- extraordinary rendition
- internment camps
- contempory technologies, e.g., mobile phones, social media, GPS apps/devices, CCTV, etc.
- Total Information Awareness
- the House Un-American Activities Committee (1938-1975)
- Historical Parallels
- Oceania and the USSR
- Oceania and Nazi Germany
- Big Brother as Hitler, Stalin, David Koresh, Jim Jones, or the cult figure of your choosing
- the Cold War
- WHIG (the White House Iraq Group run by VP Cheney) as the Inner Party
- 1984 as a warning about how democracies become authoritarian states run by elites
- the (ab)uses of torture
- the Culture of Oceania
- the sense of self and identity in Oceania and contemporary society
- the individual and the state: the relationship between the citizen and the government
- rewriting history
- using media to create a world view
- the use of "sloganeering"
- sexual repression
- family, home, and culture
- socialization of the children and the citizen
I want you to write your research paper proposal now. (I have an example online of a paper proposal that I wrote on an aspect of Orwell's novel that I found interesting.) Likewise, I would like you to write a paragraph or two explaining what your area of research is in as much detail as you can about the topic: for example, what are the possible questions you wish to answer, what are the areas of the research you want to know more about, what are the areas of the research you find most fascinating, etc. Include a tentative title for the paper as well. This exercise is an informal description and exploration of your topic — just something to help you frame the issues you wish to study as you begin your research. Send it to me as an email or post it on eForum so that people with similar interests can help each other find and share useful resources. I recommend eForum. To be able to share information is the advantage of networked computing, isn't it? (Obviously, I think so: I make all of my course materials available to students and teachers worldwide.) Let's use this technology's potential. Please consider sharing your ideas and your proposals with others.
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