On 19-20 March 2010, the Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3 held a conference, the first of its kind in France, on the politics and literature of George Orwell. Entitled ‘George Orwell – a political conscience of the 20th Century’, the event drew together a range of impressive speakers (in English and French) on subjects including Orwell on Palestine, Orwell’s works on film and commemorations of Orwell in Britain today.
To watch the presentations, visit our ‘About Orwell’ page.
Friday morning
- Olivier Esteves (Lille 3): Orwell, l’empire colonial et l’opinion publique britannique (French)
- Jacques Dewitte (philosopher, translator): Orwell, un conservateur-libéral-socialiste? (French)
- Jean-Jacques Rosat (Collège de France): Ni anarchiste ni tory – Orwell et « la révolte intellectuelle » (French)
Friday afternoon
- Charles Holdefer (Université de Poitiers): ‘As surely doomed as the hippopotamus’ – George Orwell and the anachronistic writer (English)
- Joseph Maslen (University of Manchester): Inside the whale of British communism (English)
- Antoine Capet (Université de Rouen): George Orwell and the ‘phoney left’, 1939-1945 (English)
- Dominic Cavendish (Daily Telegraph, playwright): Coming Up for Air revisited – Orwell, England, and the idea of escape (English)
- Sébastien Lefait (Université de Corse): « The Big Screen is watching you » – 1984 (Michael Radford) ou le Panopticon cinématographique (French)
- Sébastien Denis (Université de Provence): La ferme des animaux revisitée – sur deux films et un album (French)
Saturday morning
- Giora Goodman (Kinneret College, Israel): George Orwell and the question of Palestine (English)
- François Bordes (IEP Paris): La gauche hétérodoxe et la réception d’Orwell en France au début de la guerre froide (French)
- Christophe Le Dréau (IEP Paris): George Orwell, icône de l’Europe unie (French)
- Dolores Martin (Cité des Sciences et de l’industrie): George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Rethinking the Spanish Civil War (English)
Saturday afternoon
- Marina Rémy Abrunhosa (ENS Lyon): Face-to-face encounters in Orwell’s early works – an aesthetics of the contemporary (English)
- John Crowley (UNESCO), S. Romi Mukherjee (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, l’Université de Chicago): Orwell’s people (English, delivered by S. Romi Mukherjee)
- Patricia Rae (Queen’s University, Ontario): Modernist Orwell (English)
- John Baxendale (Sheffield Hallam University): Orwell and Priestley – two ways of being a left-wing writer in 20th Century England (English, delivered by Olivier Esteves)
- Jeremy Tranmer (Nancy 2): Big brother watching friends and foes? George Orwell and the British Left (English)
- Philippe Vervaecke (Université de Lille III): Orwell as heritage – commemorations of Orwell in contemporary Britain, c. 1994-2010 (English)