A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mind Control Strategies in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

This paper attempts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of mind control strategies in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). More specifically, the paper tries to shed lights on the discursive practices that are used to control the public’s minds in a way that guarantees complete compliance to a specific ideology. Orwell’s novel is one of the distinguished narratives in the twentieth century. This type of fiction has always been a site of power conflict reflecting the atrocities committed against the public by those in power. The main objective of the paper is to uncover the strategies employed to control minds. It tries to explore the extent to which these discursive tactics are used to direct attitudes and change behavior. The paper therefore attempts to offer a linguistic shield against the manipulative use of language. In doing so, the paper adopts CDA in the analysis of the selected data. Some CDA’s strategies have been marked and analyzed as indicative in exposing the extent to which language is biased towards mind control. Three main strategies are discussed here: simplification, euphemism and morphologicalization. The paper reveals that specific discursive practices have manipulatively been used by the elites to reformulate the ideological responses and attitudinal thinking of the masses.

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