Orwell vs. Tolkien on Surveillance

Posted January 14, 2015

Aaron Santesso is featured in a new film project, “Do Not Track” by Snitow-Kaufman Productions, on privacy, big data, and surveillance.

Recent events in France have led the directors of the documentary to pre-release a segment of the film which addresses government surveillance and why it fails, framed within a comparison between Orwell and Tolkien.

Santesso discusses surveillance through a literary lens with David Rosen, an English professor at Trinity College, with whom he co-authored “The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood.” A winner of the 45th Annual James Russel Lowell Prize, the book spans nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, examining the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together as kindred modern practices.

Aaron Santesso, Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, specializes in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature. His research focuses on ethics, law and legal studies, literature, philosophy, policy, and social movements.