Totalitarian Novels: History and Language in 1984
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss how totalitarian states destroy the human spirit before introducing Hillsdale College president Dr. Larry P. Arnn.
Totalitarian novels depict regimes that exert complete and pervasive control over the lives of their subjects. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, and C.S. Lewis imagine the terrible possibilities of unchecked modern tyranny. Join Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale College students in this exploration of 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, and That Hideous Strength.
The course includes four lectures and four conversations, each about 30 minutes long. It is structured with one lecture about each book followed by a conversation between Dr. Arnn and the students about themes from that book.
Orwell explores the possibility of a regime influencing human nature by controlling history and reforming language to limit the range of ideas its subjects can contemplate. Although the novel does not provide hope to the characters, the reader is inspired to courageous resistance against such a regime.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:12.6 | And I'm Juan Davos. We are back with totalitarian novels. Lecture 2 today, 1984, History and Language. |
| 0:19.9 | As I mentioned in the preceding lecture, this course has a little bit |
| 0:22.4 | of a different format. Dr. Arnd does a textual analysis of the novel he's discussing. It gives |
| 0:27.3 | you a plot summary and talks about some of the most important points. And then we shift to a conversation |
| 0:32.0 | with Dr. Arne's real-life students. These are students from the totalitarian novels class he taught on campus in spring |
| 0:39.4 | of 2024. So today you'll hear their conversation. And these students are bringing passages from the |
| 0:44.8 | book. They'll read them out loud and they'll say, Dr. Arn, how do we analyze this thing? And Dr. Arn, |
| 0:49.9 | being the good teacher that he is, will often ask them some questions and get them to think. |
| 0:54.3 | So you get to be part of that today. And I mentioned it in last episode, but I want to reemphasize it today |
| 1:00.1 | that this is really when you start learning a book. Because if you just go through the narrative, |
| 1:06.0 | sometimes you miss some of the important themes that the book is trying to address. And in this discussion that |
| 1:12.2 | the students have with Dr. Arn, the importance of love and family and education in the regime |
| 1:20.0 | come up in the discussion. And I love the last part, Dr. Arn summarizes succinctly. He says, yeah, it's a book about power |
| 1:30.6 | and it's power that is exercised against love because love is what makes you resist that kind |
| 1:38.2 | of totalitarian power. And so that kind of power needs to overcome or try to conquer love. And that's what the book is about. |
| 1:47.0 | 1984 paints a really good picture of what makes a totalitarian regime totalitarian. It means it tries to |
| 1:53.3 | infiltrate every aspect of human life and then replace it. So when we're talking about love, |
| 1:57.7 | when we think about the bonds of traditional love, that's between |
| 2:00.8 | husband and wife and mother and father and brother and sister, and even neighbors and relations, |
| 2:07.2 | and this regime wants to replace that with love for the party, and it's really not even love. |
| 2:12.5 | Dr. Arn talked about pain in the prior lecture. |
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