Language, Individual & Society, Volume 10, 2016

Abstract: In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, fear for modernity and post-war anxiety is visually and psychologically constructed within the framework of a totalitarian state. I would argue that in Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell such fear has transformed or permeated into our society in greater extent than its predecessor in which our individuality has been lost and subsequently humans would succumb to an “altered realityˮ that is prevalent in the post-modern world. I would demonstrate Lessing’s strategies in achieving such horror by utilizing Michel Foucault’s notion of power.