{"id":16908,"date":"2024-07-10T21:18:31","date_gmt":"2024-07-11T01:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=16908"},"modified":"2024-07-10T21:18:33","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T01:18:33","slug":"episode-595-laura-beers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-595-laura-beers","title":{"rendered":"Episode 595 – Laura Beers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 595:
\nLaura Beers<\/a><\/p>\n

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“I came to Orwell interested in him as a political historian and how he can help us understand our modern politics.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Historian, professor & author Laura Beers<\/a> joins the show as we celebrate her important new book, ORWELL’S GHOSTS: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century<\/a> (Norton). We talk about her course on Orwell and the making of the early twentieth century, how the post-Jan. 6 misuse of “Orwellian” inspired her to write this book, and her own path into Orwell. We get into Orwell’s balancing act between freedom of speech and obligation to truth, what he meant when he wrote that he was “for democratic socialism, as I understand it,” his family’s history with Empire and his hatred of inequality, why my favorite of his essays, Inside The Whale<\/em><\/a>, may be the most misunderstood Orwell piece of all (!), and why The Road To Wigan Pier<\/a> might have the most influence on her. We also discuss the ways to reckon with Orwell’s prejudices and especially his misogyny, why students are still coming into college with Animal Farm<\/a> under their belt, Laura’s trip to Barcelona to follow Orwell’s steps in the Spanish Civil War, how her chapter on gender involved some deep, critical reading and writing, how we should look at the “blacklist” Orwell provided to the Information Research Dept., how Laura’s next book on the politics of infertility sort of dovetails with Orwell’s Ghosts<\/em>, and more! Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read ORWELL’S GHOSTS<\/a>!<\/p>\n

“There’s a lot of value in using an Orwellian lens: not just ‘censorship bad, free speech good,’ but to actually look at the writing and the more nuanced things that it says about national identity and patriotism in modern life, about the role of class, about the role of group-affinities. There’s a lot more to his writing than the knee-jerk caricatures that most people go to when they hear the word ‘Orwellian.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n