This essay considers how Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) assesses the function and limits of ‘ideas’ in two ways: by focusing on how ideas (plural) can be reduced, through the operations of power, to an idea (singular); and by investigating how people can be turned into abstractions through the work of ideology. Attending throughout to the form of Orwell’s most famous novel, the essay positions Nineteen Eighty-Four in relation to Wyndham Lewis’s critique of Orwell in The Writer and the Absolute (1952); traces the origins of Orwell’s account of power and truth to his experiences in the Spanish Civil War; and compares Orwell’s writing with the work of H. G. Wells, a key precursor. The essay concludes with some reflections on Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ambiguous ending and on the ingenious yet problematic critical strategies through which a tincture of hope is discovered in this bleakest of bleak satires.

Chapter 12 analyzes the phenomenon whereby various types of elements may appear in postverbal position in Korean: arguments such as the subject, the object, the indirect object, and clausal complements may be dislocated to the right. Moreover, a variety of non-argument projections such as adverbials, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and small clause predicates may also appear in a postverbal position. The chapter focuses on two basic issues on RDCs: (i) whether the RDC involves a mono-clausal or bi-clausal structure and (ii) whether postverbal elements undergo movement or are base-generated. The chapter also looks into differences among sub-varieties of RDCs in Korean, as classified by the grammatical and semantic function of the Right-Dislocated material, the type of the correlate in the main clause, and the number of dislocated items. Cross-linguistic implications of the Korean data for the current research on RDCs in other languages such as English, Dutch, German, and Bangla are also discussed.