Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor Peter Marks, University of Sydney, Australia

George Orwell and the BBC: Literature, Empire and Propaganda

15 May - 15 June 2023

Biography

Peter Marks is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sydney, where he taught for 25 years. He previously taught at the University of Hull and completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Marks is particularly interested in the work of George Orwell; in relationships between literature and cinema, and between literature and politics; in literary periodical culture; in the essay form; in utopias, and in surveillance, particularly as depicted in literature and cinema. Along with numerous articles and book chapters on these and other topics, he has written four scholarly monographs: on Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, in Manchester University Press’s British Filmmakers series (2009); George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture (2011); Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film (2015); British Literature of the 1990s: Endings and Beginnings (2018). He is Co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures (2022), which includes over 50 chapters from scholars from five continents.  Professor Marks is currently working on a 3-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project titled ‘The International Orwell: Case Studies from Eastasia, Oceania and Eurasia’. Forthcoming research outputs include chapters on the modern essay form for the Cambridge History of the English Essay and on George Orwell’s essays in the Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. He has been a Research Fellow at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and King’s College, London. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Research Summary

The project focuses on Orwell’s multi-faceted engagement with the BBC, whether as critic, employee, or as outside contributor. While the 2017 statue to Orwell outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House suggests a beneficial relationship, Orwell infamously described his war-time employment at the BBC Eastern Service (1941-43) as “two wasted years”. The project proposes that his period working for the Eastern Service was far more consequential. Orwell would prove a cultural innovator, a deft political analyst, and an astute educator. He wrote and presented regular war newsletters broadcast in English and a half-dozen Asian languages. He acknowledged that these balanced uncomfortably on the edge of propaganda, but they presented an important pro-Allied case in an era of anti-imperialist sentiment. A series of educational programmes Orwell produced on non-literary topics meant primarily for Indian university students featured leading social and political thinkers such as V. Gordon Childe, J.D. Bernal and Joseph Needham. It has been characterised as prototype of The Open University. Orwell also helped create and front an on-air literary magazine, “Voice”, whose participants included T.S. Eliot, Mulk Raj Anand and E.M. Forster. After the war, Orwell would adapt his breakthrough text, Animal Farm (1945), for the Third Programme, reworking the novella for radio and introducing new thematic and aesthetic elements that recalibrate our understanding of that classic. Aspects of his time at the BBC would find their way into Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). To date, Orwell’s sustained and sometimes surprising connections to the BBC have not received much scholarly attention. This project brings together the expertise of an Orwell scholar, Peter Marks, Professor of English at the University of Sydney, and Simon Potter, the leading BBC historian and Professor of History at the University of Bristol, to examine Orwell’s sustained and sometimes surprising BBC associations in-depth for the first time.

Professor Marks will be hosted by Professor Simon Potter, History Department.

Planned Lectures include:

• Public Lecture - Is Big Brother Still Watching? George Orwell and Surveillance in the 21st Century
  Tuesday 30th May, 4.30 pm, 
  
  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the go-to text for the general public’s sense of surveillance. It has also played an influential role in the academic examination of surveillance. But in the 21st century, does it retain its explanatory power? In this lecture, I examine the validity of Orwell’s novel in our own time, measuring its value against recent insights on so-called surveillance capitalism.
  
  
• Departmental Lecture - ‘Big Other Is Watching You: Literature and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
  Wednesday 24th May
  
  George Orwell remains the essential literary figure for the general public’s sense of surveillance. But though Shoshana Zuboff promotes the value of literature as critique in her recent study, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she gives other writers and other literary creations preference over Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this lecture, I consider Zuboff’s use of literature in assessing surveillance capitalism, exploring her inventive take on literature’s explanatory and liberating power.   

 

• Postgraduate Lecture - A History of Imagined Societies
  
  This lecture uses Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as the starting point for a consideration of the history of the utopian genre (which also includes dystopias). It tracks key developments from Thomas More’s genre-defining Utopia through to recent projections, examining how the genre has generated an almost infinite array of dreams and warnings, analyses and projections. While its critics berate the utopia as a dangerous intellectual straitjacket, this lecture argues for the vitality of the genre over five centuries, proposing that it requires us to imaginatively engage with our hopes and fears.