Customer Reviews

All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays

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This selection of essays provides excellent insight for anyone who appreciates the theories of George Orwell.
Readers will get a better understanding of class warfare, secrets of great communicators, totalitarianism, the effects of literature, and, of course, propaganda. I especially enjoyed his essay on "The Prevention of Literature", as it implies the ideas written into his masterpiece known as 1984.

I highly recommend this book to all writers and political thinkers.

Offering a wide range of Orwell's essays, which were mostly written late in his remarkable life, this collection will stimulate your thinking about entertainment, writing, politics, and other topics. Orwell writes to make one think. Reading these essays is like having a provocative conversation with one of the most interesting and broad-spectrum minds of the first half of the 20th century. Definitely recommended.

George Orwell was a fine essayist and successful critic, discussing art and literature with equal ability and ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA: CRITICAL ESSAYS is a key recommendation for all kinds of libraries, from college-level collections strong in literature and social observation to collection also strong in art criticism. It's the latter that should especially consider ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA: it provides Orwell's reflections on a range of critical topics from literature to art. Very highly recommended.

This title is a companion volume to one titled Facing Unpleasant Facts. That volume dealt with many of the famous narrative essays produced in Orwell's career, whereas this one has selections of what the editor calls `Critical Essays". Both are highly valuable as source material for those interested in Orwell. In fact, I believe that he was a far better essayist and first-person writer than he ever was a novelist.

The books that his legacy stands on for most readers are good, but in his essays we can see him explore the ideas that lead to the creation of both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm: Centennial Edition. In fact, both the essays "Politics and the English Language" and "The Prevention of Literature" could be easily attached as appendices to those books (both essays are in the present volume).

The only practical issue with this book is that many of the essays are more of the literary criticism approach or movie reviews (even if he would hate that characterization). If you do not have a familiarity with the source material that he is reviewing, you might seem out of sorts. In essays on both the careers of Dickens and Tolstoy I felt a disconnect because it taxed my limited familiarity with those authors.

The interesting thing about Orwell's writing is that the prerequisite knowledge is not really necessary. He uses the essay form to great strength, using what he is often ostensibly writing about as a launching point to talk about the world at large. In this sense, I kept thinking that on many levels his work is some of the first that could really be at home in a cultural studies department. I then realized that his writing voice precludes that. His work is and his voice is a plain, clear English that he advocated and is free of jargon. As smart as Orwell is, his writing feels like a conversation with an interesting and clever friend, which must be why I keep going back to his

I read only one item in this collection for the rather pompous reason that there was a sole Orwell film review that I had never read and I wanted my Orwell wanderings to be complete! The other essays I have read elsewhere.

The GREAT DICTATOR was the film that enraged Hitler. The right wing has always spewed venom on Charles Chaplin...perhaps it was because he was a leftist Hitler look alike who had a great media influence in his day. Orwell gave this film a great review mentioning only a few technical faults. Orwell wanted the English government to subsidize the film's distribution during the War which would have been cost effective and appropriate...

"The government should subsidize the Great Dictator heavily and try to get copies into Germany." Fat chance.

On Chaplin, the twentieth century everyman, Orwell wrote...

"What is Chaplin's particular gift? If it is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West." p146.

These selections are worth the time to read, as is nearly everything Orwell wrote. The reader is warned, however,that many Orwell collections are overlapping or fragmentary. Look carefully at the table of contents of Orwell books to save money before buying and look at my numerous Orwell reviews for guidance. Regards.

The title of this collection of Orwell's essays is taken from the initial entry discussing Charles Dickens and it is a well chosen title. The inability of artists to be completely apolitical is the theme that holds this anthology together as Orwell examines topics ranging from the art of Salvador Dali, to Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Graham Greene. The fact that Orwell left England to risk in life in the Spanish Civil War fighting for the republican forces only to memorialize his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, puts him in a unique position to examine the intersection of art and politics.

The acerbic wit and ranging intelligence of Orwell is on full display in this pages. In addition, his rabid fear and hate of totalitarianism that has made him a touchstone for intellectuals both left and right is also apparent in his lucid analysis of Gulliver's travels and the supposed "utopia" of the Houyhnhnms. Some of these essays are familiar, such as Politics and the English Language but others are more obscure, such as Benefits of the Clergy: Some Notes on Salavdor Dali which was censored for obscenity in 1946. My particular favorite is Confessions of a Book Reviewer, which lacks the strong political overtones of his other essays but gives a vivid image into the overlooked aspect of Orwell's life as a workaday journalist and book reviewer.

Despite not living to see the Cold War or the rise of religious fanaticism his thoughts and words still matter. For those who are unfamiliar with Orwell outside 1984 or Animal Farm, All Art is Propaganda provides a great starting point into the writings of one of the great political writers of the modern era.

This was the book that first endeared me to George Orwell. His honesty and clear thinking are a joy to experience. It is a fun book to read that gave me a lot to think about, and I highly recommend it.

Wide-ranging; check. Interesting; check. Clearly-written--double check. One thing that made these essays so refreshing to me is their total lack of jargon. I wish all critics could write this well, and would love to hear of others who do.