Thoughtcrime

Satire has a long History in the English language and there is no question that a whole array of linguistic and grammatical devices have developed to support this style of writing over the centuries. We examined an excerpt from some of Clive James' travel writing "A Postcard from Russia" and discovered the same complex sentence forms and periodic structure that we noted last time in Mark Twain's writing. In Frankie Boyle's treatise on the insanity of the British plan to replace it's entire fleet of Trident nuclear powered submarines, we also noticed the lurch between understandment and hyperbole fuelled his work. They all develop a semantic field through careful word choice. It's worth noting that I have selected a number of satirical pieces that inhabit the socio-politics of the Cold War era - and this is going to make sense to you when we start to read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, as it's just these preoccupations that he so presciently warned us about. Now it's time for you to have a go at writing your own satire - and you may even be willing to read some of them for the next episode of this podcast.

Podcast: Postcard from Russia

Welcome to the first Thoughtcrime podcast. Throughout the year, these podcasts will be published to accompany the resources and materials on this site. We start the year with a quick study of the grammatical and figurative mechanisms of satire - and in this podcast I summarise some of the key knowledge and ideas that we've been wrestling with. We took ourselves back to the 19th century to start with and here I make some key observations about Mark Twains "Advice to Youth".

TC001 Advice to Youth

The podcast for the Level 3 Thoughtcrime English Literature course