A Cultural Materialist Approach to George Orwell’s text The Road to Wigan Pier
Journal Title: Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences - Year 2014, Vol 2, Issue 4
Abstract
The period of the production of George Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier, the 1930s, was very crucial and critical on both intellectual and political levels. The book was published in 1937, that is, the period between the two world wars and after the Great Depression (1929). At that time both intellectuals and politicians were faced with vexed problems such as mass unemployment, poverty and democracy. Committed writers such as George Orwell took interest in the way to represent these problems at that critical moment of human history. The problems facing genre during that period reflect the complexity of the situation, hence the problematic of The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell’s text is problematic due to the ambiguity of its status as a literary genre and the way it deals with vital issues facing intellectuals as part of the social structure. The text is subversive on many levels. Apart from the form of the book which is effectively very challenging, another essential aspect of subversion can be explored in this work of art. In fact, contrary to the conventional view of the fictional novel as an isolated entity, the study of Orwell’s text from a different perspective, that is, the materialist historical theory, reveals the social dimension of the book. Challenging the bourgeois conception of the novel, the author diagnoses the social ills, namely, poverty and unemployment, in the first part of the book in order to provide the necessary treatment in the second part, that is, Socialism. There is a close connection in the novel between reality and language as an essential medium of representation. Thus, literary creativity and representation are mediated. Furthermore, as a committed writer, Orwell is deeply involved in the problems concerning literature and politics. For Orwell, literature cannot be dissociated from politics. Consequently, the exploration of the novel from different angles does not aim at the pure application of some literary and critical approaches on Orwell’s text. This may be misleading since the investigation may fall in superficiality and simplicity. But each strategy deployed is actually a further contribution to the author’s general argument and a manifestation of the novel’s status as a creative and subversive text. Keywords: Socialism, Cultural Materialism, Materialist Historical Theory, Fictionality, Factuality, Representation, Literariness.
Authors and Affiliations
Chaabane Bechir Preparatory Institute for Engineering Studies. Sfax, Tunisia
Keywords
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