Imagination at work notion

To illustrate the theme Imagination at work, I have chosen to present 2 texts we studied in class. The first one is an excerpt from Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley published in 1932. The second document is taken from 1984 written by George Orwell published in 1948. To complete my presentation I will comment on a personal document which is the front cover of the novel Hunger Games written by Suzanne Collins published in 2008.

First of all, it's quite interesting to study both documents together as they have a lot in common. Here I would like to show to what extent it's interesting to compare and oppose both texts.

They are both about worlds under dictatorship and written in the 20th century. The first text is set in London as well as the second one.

So the first text is set in London in 2540, it's about a dictatorship named The World State. It has established a stable global society where the population is permanently limited. At the beginning of the novel, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (DHC) is giving students a tour of the labs in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center in the Neo Pavlovian room, named after Ian Pavlov that did a experimentation on dogs’ reflexes. In the second chapter, the students are shown how the babies’ reflexes are conditioned. Indeed, they put babies on the floor and wait for them to reach flowers and books. Then they give a signal: “There was a violent explosion. [...] Alarm bells maddeningly sounded. The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.” (l.28-30) "They'll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned.” (l.33-34). Although the novel is set in the future it deals with contemporary issues of the early 20th century because he criticised Eugenics as babies are entirely shape from A to Z: their numbers, their future… He wanted to warn people about the consequences.

The second extract is about the lead charatacter of the novel named Winston Smith in his appartement thinking of a scene that happened earlier. During the Two minutes of hate imposed by the government he caught a guy named O’Brien looking at him: “Momentarily, he caught O’Brien’s eye.” (l.7) it may seems insignificant but it disturbed him so while he was thinking about it, his hand wrote “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” (l.40) Writing on diary was forbidden so “He could not help feeling a twinge of panic” (l.46).Winston became persuaded that O'Brien was on his side and was in fact a member of the resistance movement but he was a traitor.

The dictator is Big Brother, his motto is “Big Brother is watching you”, there’s a lot of propaganda with posters of him everywhere in the streets. There is also the Thought Police that spies on people. The slogan of the dictatorship is “War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength”. Orwell wanted to criticise totalitarian regimes like Nazism.

As we can see in both texts, the author’s aim was to denounce the society they lived in. They were both visionaries since Huxley predicted Nazism and Orwell depicted a society that can possibly happen today.

So to illustrate the theme I have made a photomontage because I couldn't find anything appropriate on the

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