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Reading and Misreading Orwell

15 January 2024, 12:30 pm–2:00 pm

Picture of book spines, all of which are written by Orwell

Join the Orwell Foundation and the IAS for two talks on 'Reading and misreading' Orwell's work across cultures, classes, and continents

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All | UCL staff | UCL students

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Orwell Foundation

Location

IAS Forum, G17
Ground Floor, South Wing Wilkins Building
University College London
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

The Orwell Foundation and the Institute of Advanced Studies are delighted to welcome Dr Débora Tavares (University of São Paulo) and Dr Nathan Waddell (University of Birmingham) for two talks on 'reading and misreading' the work of George Orwell across cultures, classes, and continents.

‘Reading Orwell from the Global South’ with Dr Débora Tavares:
“In this talk, I will approach George Orwell’s writings primarily from a Global Southern point of view, highlighting the relationship between social classes and inequality. Orwell’s work constantly invites us to analyse the details of common life and not to ignore those forgotten by the system. My focus will be on Orwell’s essays like ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936), ‘Down the Mine’ (1937), and ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), along with books like Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).”

‘Wyndham Lewis Misreading Orwell’ with Dr Nathan Waddell:
“The focus of this talk is the highly critical account of Orwell given by Wyndham Lewis in The Writer and the Absolute (1952), Lewis’s late-career assessment of the position of the writer in society. Lewis and Orwell were not close associates, but Lewis knew Orwell’s books closely, or thought he did, and The Writer and the Absolute cuts into several problems at the heart of Orwell’s writing even as it spectacularly misjudges much of it—a characteristically Lewisian move. Reconstructing the details of these misreadings, I will suggest that Orwell was in certain respects one of Lewis’s many inter-war doppelgängers.”

About the Speakers

Dr Débora Tavares

at University of São Paulo

Débora Tavares has a master’s degree in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and a PhD in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and The Road to Wigan Pier, both from University of São Paulo. She researches and teaches connections between literature and society, as well as Orwell’s writings.

Dr Nathan Waddell

at University of Birmingham

Nathan Waddell is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham and the author of Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (2019). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020) and an Oxford World’s Classics edition of Orwell’s novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (2021). Currently he’s writing a creative-critical trade book on Orwell for Oneworld.