Teaching 1984 with Learning Stations

Jody Polleck
The Steinhardt School of Education, New York University

STATION #1
Look through the two Charlotte Perkins Gilman texts. How do they connect or disconnect with 1984?
 
STATION #2: Philosophical Lens
1. Solipsism is the theory that the self is the only thing that can be known or verified, where self is the only reality. What are your thoughts on this philosophy?

2. O’Brien tells Winston, “Reality is inside the skull…Nothing exists except through human consciousness” (236). How much of this is true?

3. Does the past have a real existence?
 
STATION #3: Language and Power
The following are excerpts from the linguist Norman Fairclough’s (2001) Language and Power. His book focuses on how language functions in maintaining and changing power relations in modern society and how people can become conscious of them and thus able to resist and change them. Read through all the quotes. What are your initial reactions? How do they relate to 1984? How real is our current reality to this novel?

“Ideologies are closely linked to power, because the nature of the ideological assumptions embedded in particular conventions, and so the nature of those conventions themselves, depends on the power relations which underlie the conventions; and because they are a means of legitimizing existing social relations and differences of power, simply through the recurrence of ordinary, familiar ways of behavior which take these relations and power differences for granted. Ideologies are closely liked to language, because using language is the commonest form of social behavior, and the form of social behavior where we
rely most on ‘commonsense’ assumptions…the exercise of power, in modern society, is increasingly achieved through ideology, and more particularly through the ideological workings of language” (2).

"Critical language study is an analysis of “social interactions in a way which focuses upon their linguistic elements, and which sets out to show up their generally hidden determinants in the system of social relationships, as well as hidden effects they may have upon that system” (4).

“Language is centrally involved in power, and struggles for power, and that it is so involved through its ideological properties” (14).

“Ideological power, the power to project one’s practices as universal and ‘common sense,’ is a significant complement to economic and political power” (27).

“Class struggle is a necessary and inherent property of a social system in which the maximization of profits and power of one class depends upon the maximization of its exploitation and domination of another” (28).

“Education, along with all other social institutions, has as its ‘hidden agenda’ the reproduction of class relations and other higher-level social structures, in addition to its overt educational agenda” (33).

“Media discourse is able to exercise a pervasive and powerful influence in social reproduction because of the very scale of modern mass media and the extremely high level of exposure of whole populations to a relatively homogeneous output” (45).

“By coming to be associated with the most salient and powerful institutions—literature, Government and administration, law, religion, education, etc.—standard English began to emerge as the language of political and cultural power, and as the language of the politically and culturally powerful” (47).

“Another less institutionally specific example of unequally distributed cultural capital is access to the various reading and writing abilities that can be summed up with the word literacy…Access to a high level of literacy is a precondition for a variety of socially valued ‘goods’” (53).

“Ideology is most effective when its workings are least visible. If one becomes aware that a particular aspect of common sense is sustaining power inequalities at one’s own expense, it cease to be common sense, and may cease to have the capacity to sustain inequalities…Invisibility is achieved when ideologies are brought to discourse not as explicit elements of the text, but as the background assumptions which on the one hand lead the text producer to ‘textualize’ the world in a particular way, and on the other hand lead the interpreter to interpret the text in a particular way” (71).

“Having the power to determine things like which word meanings or which linguistic and communicative norms are legitimate or ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ is an important aspect of social and ideological power, and therefore a focus of ideological struggle” (73)…“The meaning system is sustained by power” (79).
 
STATION #4: Teen Propaganda
These magazines (provide samples or examples) are popular among young adults currently. What propaganda, if any, are they providing to adolescents?

STATION #5: Psychology Lens
You are a leading psychologist and have just been transplanted to Oceania in 1984. How would you assess the following characters:

1. Winston
2. Julia
3. O’Brien
 
STATION #6: Newspeak
You have just been hired by the Ministry of Truth to translate the following Shakespeare sonnet into Newspeak. (Please be sure to use the newest 11th
edition dictionary.)

William Shakespeare
Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 
STATION #7: Intertextuality
How are these texts common to one another? (Slaughterhouse Five, Among the Hidden, 1984, and The Giver)