![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: All Art is Propaganda
Oct. 5th, 2019 07:28 amHaving finished - finally! - going through all my Ilf & Petrov quotes, I can now start unloading George Orwell quotes on you, from the essay collection All Art is Propaganda.
I should start by saying that the title of this book arises from the fact that Orwell repeats this phrase, or variations of it, in at least half the essays - which makes it sound like its going to be very samy, when in fact it isn’t at all, but there are some definite themes running through all the essays. Three of them really stuck out to me.
1. “All art is propaganda,” obviously. Orwell is not arguing that all art is literally propaganda in the sense that the government is paying for it, but in the sense that all art - consciously or unconsciously - advances a view of the world. There’s a particularly excellent chapter where he talks about the boys’ boarding school stories that ran in a popular magazines at the time, and notes that they all have a conservative bent, which arises simply from the fact that they’re set in and subtly glorify the British boarding school establishment.
( This got really long and I still didn’t get it all in, so I’ll have to make a second Orwell post. )
I should start by saying that the title of this book arises from the fact that Orwell repeats this phrase, or variations of it, in at least half the essays - which makes it sound like its going to be very samy, when in fact it isn’t at all, but there are some definite themes running through all the essays. Three of them really stuck out to me.
1. “All art is propaganda,” obviously. Orwell is not arguing that all art is literally propaganda in the sense that the government is paying for it, but in the sense that all art - consciously or unconsciously - advances a view of the world. There’s a particularly excellent chapter where he talks about the boys’ boarding school stories that ran in a popular magazines at the time, and notes that they all have a conservative bent, which arises simply from the fact that they’re set in and subtly glorify the British boarding school establishment.
( This got really long and I still didn’t get it all in, so I’ll have to make a second Orwell post. )
