Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism

There have been many studies of George Orwells life and work, but nothing quite like this book by Alex Wolochan exuberant, revisionary account of Orwells writing.

Good prose is like a window-pane, Orwell famously avers. But what kind of literary criticism is possible, face-to-face with Orwells plain-style prose? Too often this style has been either dismissed by a seemingly more savvy critical theory, or held up as a reprimand against the enterprise of theory. In a series of unusually close and intensive readingsfocused on the unstable event of writing itselfWoloch recovers the radical and experimental energies of Orwells prose. Against accounts that would quickly naturalize Orwells truthfulness or reduce his window-pane prose to bad faith, Wolochs study bears down on a propulsive irony and formal restlessness that have always been intertwined with Orwells plain-style. Such restlessness, far from diluting Orwells democratic and socialist politics, is at its aesthetic and conceptual core.

The first half of Or Orwell ranges across his nonfiction prose, including new readings of A Hanging, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Inside the Whale. The second half develops an extended analysis of a single writing project: Orwells eighty As I Please newspaper columns, written for the Socialist weekly Tribune. Moving through multiple forms and genres, testing the limits of each, Orwell emerges in Wolochs fine-grained account as a boldly unconventional writer and a central figure in twentieth-century literature and political thought.