The Syllabus

1984, by George Orwell

Recommended Reading Schedule

Book 1

1. 1-20                Due  Tuesday, 2/16 — Reading #1:  What Caught Your Eye? student notes
2. 20-29              Due  Tuesday, 2/16
3. 29-37              Due  Tuesday, 2/16
4. 37-48              Due  Tuesday, 2/16
5. 48-63              Due  Tuesday, 2/16
6. 63-69              Due  Tuesday, 2/16
7. 69-81              Due  Thursday, 2/18 — Reading #2:  What Caught Your Eye? student notes
8. 81-104            Due  Thursday, 2/18

Book 2

1. 105-117         Due  Monday, 2/22 — Reading #3:  What Caught Your Eye? student notes
2. 117-126         Due  Monday. 2/22
3. 127-136         Due  Monday, 2/22
4. 136-147         Due  Monday, 2/22
5. 147-156         Due  Wednesday, 2/24 — Reading #4: What Caught Your Eye? student notes
6. 157-159         Due  Wednesday, 2/24
7. 160-167         Due  Wednesday, 2/24
8. 167-179         Due  Wednesday, 2/24
9. 179-217         Due  Monday, 3/1  — Reading #5: What Caught Your Eye? student notes               Note: long section w/ Goldstein’s book –
   
10. 217-224         Due  Wednesday, 3/3 — Reading #6: What Caught Your Eye? student notes

Book 3

1. 225-239         Due  Wednesday, 3/3
2. 239-260         Due  Friday, 3/5 — Reading #7: What Caught Your Eye? student notes
3. 260-274         Due  Monday, 3/8 — Reading #8:  What Caught Your Eye? student notes
4. 274-282         Due  Monday, 3/8
5. 282-287         Due  Wednesday, 3/10 — Reading #9:  What Caught Your Eye? student notes
6. 287-297         Due  Wednesday, 3/10

‘Optional’ Reading Quizzes:

• #1: Wed, 2/17
• #2: Tues, 2/23
• #3: Thurs, 2/24
• #4: Tues, 2/29
• #5: Thurs, 2/31

Midterm Exam: Friday, 3/12

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Highly Recommended when you get a chance to read it:

1. Dictionary of key terms in 1984
2. Appendix: Principles of Newspeak 298-312

[Psst: you can click that link to learn all you want.  Go ahead.  Try it!]

An excerpt from that link:

“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist, It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile, it gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of Newspeak dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, that we are concerned here.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.”