History Of 1984

Submitted By 21aimeegrace
Words: 370
Pages: 2

both in oceania and gilead, rationalised and controlled temporality is supplemented by the state's attempts to manipulate traces of memory
1984: simultaneous control of personal memory and state history is the founding principle of ingsoc's doctrine member's memories are controlled by a way of lunatic dislocation in the mind (doublethink) the handmaid's tale: physical and symbolic remnants of before are either renamed or completely destroyed offred (herself deprived of name and identity) goes shopping and is haunted by echoes of vanished buildings like everything else in gilead, erasure of the past is distinctly gendered, most of the shops carrying things for men are still open it's just the ones dealing in vanities that are closed money is a thing of the past, it is something to be stuck in a photo album to be remembered
As well as tearing down, covering up, and otherwise superseding the material culture of the undesirable past, Gilead, like Oceania, attempts actively to reshape its historiography so that the relation between past and present conforms to proper ideological principles. The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four uses the discourse of history to posit an absolute, irreducible break between a supposedly ghastly pre-Revolutionary past, and a glorious, utopian present and future. To borrow from Derrida, its historiography consists in a series of
“detestable revisionisms” (90), such as the child’s history text that Winston transcribes into his diary, which contrasts the (supposedly) “dark, dirty, miserable place” that was capitalist London with “the