Introduction

• Engels
• Further Education (Key Stage 5)

Goals for today 

Background information on A Clockwork Orange 

Important ideas and research 

Language choices 

Anthony Burgess was an English writer and composer (1917 –1993) from Manchester.

“What I had tried to write was a sort of Christian allegory of free will. Man is defined by his capacity to choose courses of moral action. If he chooses good, he must have the possibility of choosing evil instead; evil is a theological necessity.” Anthony Burgess

Allegory 

The principles technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape. In written narrative, allegory involves a continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story, so that its persons and events correspond to the equivalents in a system of ideas. 

Adapted Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 

Burgess lived and taught in Malaya for 6 years before writing A Clockwork Orange.

He returned to Britain to a new British phenomenon – the violence of teenage gangs. Youth sub-cultures, such as ‘Teddy boys’, ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’, had appeared, each with a distinct style of dress, and a reputation for violence.

This gave Burgess the idea to write a novel set in the near future, “in which youthful aggression reaches so frightful a pitch that the government try to burn it out with Pavlovian techniques of negative reinforcement.” Burgess 

Burgess wanted the narrator to be a teenage thug, so he wrote a draft using slang words from the 60s. However, he feared that these words would be out of date by the time the book was published. Eventually, he found a solution: “The vocabulary of my space-age hooligan could be a mixture of Russian and demotic (colloquial)  English, seasoned with rhyming slang and gipsy argot*.” He called it ‘Nadsat’ (the Russian word for ‘teen’). 

Burgess had spent some of 1961 in Russia researching for a travel book for his publisher. 

 A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962.

Argot: words and expressions that are used by small groups of people and that are not easily understood by other people.

Cambridge online dictionary 

Mods vs Rockers

Whitsun 1964 has become famous as the peak of the Mods and Rockers riots, as large groups of teenagers committed mayhem on the rain-swept streets of southern seaside resorts. 

Jon Savage The Guardian Features writer 

Mods and Rockers were two conflicting British youth subcultures of the early/mid 1960s to early 1970s. Media coverage of mods and rockers fighting in 1964 sparked a moral panic about British youth, and the two groups became widely perceived as violent, unruly troublemakers.

Wikipedia 

Rockers 

The rocker subculture was centred on motorcycling, and generally black leather jackets and motorcycle boots.  The common rocker hairstyle was a pompadour and their music genre of choice was 1950s rock and roll.

Mods 

The mod subculture was centred on fashion and music, and many mods rode scooters. Mods wore suits and other ‘cleancut’ outfits, and listened to 1960s music genres such as soul, blues, beat music and ska. 

Watch the video. Write down what Burgess' motivation was for writing the novel? 

Important terms 

Dystopia
Communism
Behavioural psychology
Autocratic society
Human behaviour according to a deterministic scheme
Social realism
Binary Oppositions
(Classical) Conditioning & Pavlov Reaction 
B. F Skinner 

Augustine of Hippo on free will 

Pelagius on free will 

You will be given a term to research. Make a one or two slides (max) explanation for this term and give and example of it in use. Explain how you think this term relates to the novella. 

Concepts 

A Clockwork Orange 

Concepts: The inviolability of free will, Manipulation, Power, Violence, Language and communication

Nadsat language construction. Find examples 

	Examples	Effect
Child-like lexi s (words)
Religious vocabulary
Shakespearian/archaic language
Cacophonic language (harsh or discordant sounds) Onomatopoeia
Poetic language
Modern slang/colloquialism
Emotive language
Russian/slavic roots

Make this table in your exercise book and collect examples.

What is the effect of these choices? 

Upward and downward convergence 

Upward convergence:  a person trying to match their interlocutor by making their speech sound more upper-class. 

Downward convergence: a person adjusts their communication to downplay their social status.

"It would interest me greatly, brother, if you would kindly allow me to see what books those are that you have under your arm."p. 6 

Make a note if you notice the protagonist changing his speech depending on his interlocutor 

Who said this, do you think? 

“Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”

Socrates, circa 470BC