Propaganda and language — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Propaganda and language
Themes
What you need to know
How Orwell explores propaganda, persuasion and the rewriting of the Seven Commandments and of the past across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures', 'they would sooner have had less figures and more food', 'Snowball's part in it was much exaggerated', 'it seemed to the animals that they did remember it', 'Somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals' memory.', 'a lantern, a paint-brush, and an overturned pot of white paint', 'Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days', 'Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!', 'a readjustment of rations', 'The van had previously been the property of the knacker', 'the sheep broke out into a tremendous bleating'.
How control of the written record lets the pigs change the past, and why the animals cannot check it.
Context: Soviet propaganda and the rewriting of the past, which Orwell saw as part of every totalitarian state, and his belief that political language is often used to deceive.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
