[Daily Mail, Where America Gets Its News] Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian story — set in a totalitarian state which persecutes individual thinking — gave the world phrases such as ’Big Brother’, ’Newspeak’ and ’thought police’.Its plot centers on Winston Smith, a government employee who is arrested and tortured over an illicit love affair, but it also makes powerful points about what can happen to a society that doesn’t cherish academic freedoms or its own history.
Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ’addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.