Genre and Animal Farm

In class, your group discussed what genre Animal Farm might be. Most of you came down on the side of fantasy, feeling that having talking animals in the novel made it a fantasy. Since that discussion, you have learned more about what George Orwell was trying to communicate about history, particularly that of the Russian Revolution.

On your four-page Animal Farm handout, please refer to page 2, "Glossary of Literary Terms", which discusses these genres: allegory, didactic literature, fable, fairy tale, parable, propaganda, and satire. Now, what genre would you say Animal Farm is? Does it fit in more than one genre? Can you make a case for still calling it a fantasy?

A war that affected a variety of artists

Animal Farm author George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's, supporting the Republicans against the fascist ruler Francisco Franco. In fact, Orwell was shot in the throat during the fighting. Orwell believed that Joseph Stalin and the Russian Communists, while supposedly supporting the Republicans, in reality tried to stop the revolution from succeeding. Orwell's negative feeling about Stalin played a part in how Orwell chose to depict Stalin a few years later in Animal Farm: as the double-crossing pig Napoleon.

Other artists witnessed the fighting in the Spanish Civil War and addressed it in other ways. Pablo Picasso, one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, painted the famous work you see above, called Guernica, in response to a battle of that war. Click on the painting for a larger view, then come back and comment:

Guernica is not a realistic picture, but has a very unusual style. What is Picasso trying to say about war with this picture? What do you see in the picture that helps Picasso communicate his opinion? Does the unusual style help him communicate his message or would you find the picture more effective if it were more realistic?

Animal Farm - Chapter 6

Early in Chapter 6, George Orwell writes
"...in August, Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons as well. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half"

What do you think as you read this passage? Can you tell us about any time in your life that you were offered a choice, but no matter what you picked, you felt that nothing good would be the result?

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What

Boy am I rusty!

I'll get back in the swing of things by posting a widget from nba.com about Ray Allen, who has returned from a flu bout and has 22 points at halftime of the Celtics' game against Dallas: