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Abstract
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The novel's engagement with truth and memory speaks urgently to contemporary intellectual concerns. First, the diary exemplifies what theorists like Gayatri Spivak identify as epistemic violence—the systematic delegitimization of certain knowledge claims and subject positions. Orwell's portrayal of how the Party erases alternative truths demonstrates that totalitarian power operates not only through surveillance and punishment but by controlling what counts as knowledge itself, a framework increasingly relevant to understanding modern information warfare and institutional silencing. Second, the figure of subjective testimony against official falsification resonates with recent scholarship on witnessing, memory studies, and the ethics of bearing witness in oppressive contexts. Winston's diary raises fundamental questions: what is the value of truth-telling when power has predetermined the outcome? What ethical or political work can testimony accomplish under conditions of domination? Third, the diary as a narrative form deserves focused attention because it uniquely embodies the paradox at the heart of totalitarianism—the regime's simultaneous terror of individual consciousness and its absolute ability to contain it. By concentrating on this specific textual object rather than on totalitarianism abstractly, we can theorize more precisely how systems of domination target consciousness itself. Fourth, the novel's meditation on memory and identity speaks to enduring philosophical questions about whether authentic thought or genuine memory can survive institutional control. Orwell suggests that the loss of memory is the loss of self; this insight, developed through Winston's diary entries, offers crucial ground for thinking about what it means to maintain human dignity under dehumanizing conditions.
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