Irony in George Orwell’s 1984: An Analysis from the Perspective of the Echo Theory

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211120.076How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Echo Theory; Irony; Dissociative Attitude

Abstract

Irony is a regularly used writing skill in literature and is an important research topic of many scholars. George Orwell is well known by his application of irony in his novel. As an opponent of totalitarianism, his works are always filled with satire art. He exposes the dark side of politics, culture and society of his time by applying irony in his novel. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book that successfully shows his well-organized ironical language. This thesis intends to analyze the irony in George Orwell’s Nineteen Ninety-Four from the perspective of the echo theory, which holds that ironic utterance is a speaker’s echo towards an opinion other than himself and at the same time an expression of the dissociative attitude of the speaker. The thesis selects examples of verbal irony with representativeness and focuses on the identification and interpretation of them under the guidance of the Sperber and Wilson’s echo theory, with the purpose to show that echo theory is a convenient and effective method to interpret irony in literary works, particularly in the subject of dystopia. Sperber and Wilson’s echo theory, within the framework of the relevance theory, provides a new method to interpret irony. The author classifies the dissociative attitude into three degrees, from doubt, contempt to rage and respectively clarify the meaning of irony presented by different attitude. The combination of echo theory and Nineteen Eighty-Four is meaningful. Frist and foremost, Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered by many as a representative work of political irony. Second, the ironic language in Nineteen Eighty-Four is so profound and accurate that it deserves much attention. Last but not least, as a dystopian literature classic; it supplies a totally different testing ground to demonstrate the feasibility of using echo theory to analyze verbal irony.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wenqing zhang
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/11/29
TI  - Irony in George Orwell’s 1984: An Analysis from the Perspective of the Echo Theory
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 3rd International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 399
EP  - 409
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211120.076
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211120.076
ID  - zhang2021
ER  -