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Teachers' Resource Web Study Questions on Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange A Clockwork Orange 1. What differences do you find between Stanley Kubrick's film and Burgess' novel? Which do you prefer, and why? 2. What's the point of all that, like, Russian slang and labor-union "O my brothers" stuff, along with the occasional Shakespearian lingo, as in, "what didst thou in thy mind intend?" 3. How might Burgess' story about Little Alex be a parody of the old-fashioned "conversion narrative," whereby the 'umble narrator goes from a state of sin to a state of belief? 4. What connections does the novel make between aesthetics (especially "high culture" art such as Alex's beloved Beethoven) and violence? How does it undercut the longstanding notion that art is necessarily an improving cultural force? 5. Alex is an adolescent--but in what sense might he be said to represent something archetypal about humanity, not just about youth? 6. How does Burgess characterize the various adults in this novel? To what extent are they responsible for the behavior of rascals like Alex, Dim, and Georgie Boy? 7. How, and how successfully, does Burgess' novel reassert the principle of Justice that seems to have been abandoned by the futuristic society and its governors? 8. To some degree Burgess' novel, like Orwell's 1984, is a "dystopian fiction." What similarities and differences do you find in the two texts' handling of the relationship between freedom and order, the individual and the collectivity? Edition: Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: Norton, 1986. ISBN: 0-393-31283-6.
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