Animal Farm In India Now?: In a dramatic worldwide insidious murmur presently, believe it or not literally, world famous Animal Farm is strongly said to be taking roots in India in 2025. Or, may be, from little earlier itself. Then, it was not taken seriously, say many categorically, pointedly. But today, considering the prevailing, all --- almost all, that is --- pervading sociology in the country, Animal Farm is being strongly likened to here. Its characters are also being inked name by name with their respective work loads specifically earmarked. Its serious yet amusing yet alarming considering India is out and out a democracy that too, working democracy that too, world's largest democracy far above the world's most powerful democracy, the USA. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is traditionally read as a satire on dictatorships in general, and the Bolshevik Revolution in particular. This article postulates the notion that the schema of the book has attained the force of metonymy to such an extent that whenever one alludes to the title of the book or some lines from it, one conjures up images associated with a dictatorship. The title of the book has become a part of the conceptual political lexicon of the English language to refer to the corruption of a utopian ideology. As an ideological state, Animal Farm has its vision, which is embedded in its constitution; it has the vote, a national anthem and a flag. It even has its patriots, double-dealers, social engineers and lechers. In this way the title Animal Farm, like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or Thomas More’s Utopia, functions metonymically to map a conceptual framework which matches the coordinates of the book. The article concludes with a look at contemporary society to show how Orwell’s satire endorses the words of Lord Acton, namely, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. ...
George Orwell’s Animal Farm: A metonym for a dictatorship. The critic John Wain, who has written prolifically on Orwell’s work, testifies to the prescience of Animal Farm as a reflection on contemporary reality: Animal Farm remains powerful satire even as the specific historical events it mocked recede into the past, because the book’s major concern is not with these incidents but with the essential horror of the human condition. There have been, are, and always will be pigs in every society, Orwell states, and they will always grab power.
Until quite recently, Gerard Steen (1994:3) avers, metaphor was seen by most linguists, philosophers and other researchers of language as a linguistic oddity. Metaphor was seen as “deviant”, a term that finds its legacy today in the label “semantic deviance” by linguists. Metaphor as a Discussions around metaphor since the time of Aristotle have traditionally been contextualized within the rhetorical domain of poetry
rather than prose. The terms “metonymy” and its related concept, “synecdoche”, have generally been subsumed by the concept of metaphor either explicitly or implicitly. American literary scholars Cleanth Brooks and Robert Warren do not even mention the terms “metonymy” and “synecdoche” in their publication of 1938, Understanding Poetry. Neither do the words appear in their later work, Modern Rhetoric (1972), although both books have a chapter each on metaphor. Wellek and Warren (1963) refer to metonymy and synecdoche as “tropes of poetry” which could be divided into “figures of contiguity and figures of similarity”.According to them, the traditional figures of contiguity are metonymy and synecdoche. The relations they express are logically or quantitatively analysable: the cause for the effect, or the contrary; the container for the contained.
Harry Sewlall Literator 23(3) Nov. 2002:81-96 ISSN 0258-2279 83 field of study was firmly established by the early works of John Middleton Murray (1931), I.A. Richards (1936) and Max Black (1962). By the end of the 1970s, with landmark publications by Ricoeur (1978), Ortony (1979), Honeck and Hoffman (1980) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the ubiquity of metaphor and metaphorical discourse seems “no more mysterious than singing or dancing – and, one might add, no more improper or deviant” (Black, 1993:21). Discussions around metaphor since the time of Aristotle have traditionally been contextualized within the rhetorical domain of poetry
rather than prose. The terms “metonymy” and its related concept, “synecdoche”, have generally been subsumed by the concept of metaphor either explicitly or implicitly. American literary scholars Cleanth Brooks and Robert Warren do not even mention the terms “metonymy” and “synecdoche” in their publication of 1938, Understanding Poetry. Neither do the words appear in their later work, Modern Rhetoric (1972), although both books have a chapter each on metaphor. Wellek and Warren (1963) refer to metonymy and synecdoche as “tropes of poetry” which could be divided into “figures of contiguity and figures of similarity”. According to them, the traditional figures of contiguity are metonymy and synecdoche. The relations they express are logically or quantitatively analysable: the cause for the effect, or the contrary; the container for the contained; the adjunct for its subject (Wellek & Warren, 1963:194).
The importance of the metonymy/metaphor distinction was first suggested by Roman Jakobson in an essay published in 1956, titled, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (quoted in Lodge, 1977:77-78). By observing the speech patterns of patients suffering from speech disability, Jakobson was able to distinguish between metaphor and metonymy. He found there were two types of aphasia: one characterized by the inability to select or substitute; the other, by the inability to combine and contextualize. The patient who could not select or substitute would make metonymic mistakes such as “fork” for “knife”, “table” for “lamp”, “smoke” for “pipe”. Patients who suffered from a contexture deficiency or a contiguity disorder would make mistakes of a metaphoric nature such as referring to a “microscope” as a “spyglass”, or “gaslight” for “fire”. Jakobson’s conclusion was that metaphor belongs to the selection or substitution axis of language, and metonymy to the combination axis of language.
At the time of writing now, there is a whole system-wise rattling in the Raisina Hill about 5Ws+1H relating to the Animal Farm in India really. If yes, even a slightest semblance of it, how to wriggle out of it right away without any ado of any kind.