Enthymema XII 2015 Literary

At the beginning of George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith thinks about beginning a diary, an act of uncensored personal expression for which he expects eventual punishment from the authorities of the dystopian State in which he lives. The prospect of punishment bothers him but it does not deter him. Another thought threatens to derail his efforts more immediately: «For whom […] was he writing this diary? » The thought threatens to be debilitating because Winston does not know people around him in the present who would appreciate it (Orwell 9). However, he strives as he approaches writing to imagine a circle of readers and the time in which such readers might live: «He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past – for an age that might be imaginary » (29). In commenting on this scene, Michael Warner emphasized the fact that such imagination of a reading public characterizes all public reading and writing. The circle of readers thus imagined always exceeds our knowledge of actual readers. For that reason, public writing, 1 even when it is not in the genre of imaginative works, is always poetic, in the sense that it creates – it does not simply reflect – the public addressed. Warner disputed the receive