120051 VO Literatures in English (2009W)

This course traces the works and career of Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, and consequently one of the most eminent satirists in the English language. Swift was a colonial, born in Ireland, and became the first Irish writer in English to achieve international distinction; he was also extremely conservative in his cultural politics, a champion of the Church of England against both Roman Catholic Protestant dissenting interests, a defender of wealth based upon aristocratic land-ownership who disdained banking interests, and a proponent of patriarchy. His advocacy of these positions appears in both overt and satirical forms, and characteristically employs a fictional narrator or voice, a device that proved very influential in the evolution of the novel during the eighteenth century. Ironically, as a satirist Swift often projected the nature or forms of ideas he hated or feared, projections that were often formative in the future development of such ideas; for instance, A Tale of a Tub displays a digressive style of writing intended to parody the 'modern' consciousness that Swift loathed, and yet that style showed influence upon avant-garde writing in English from Laurence Sterne to James Joyce.
Irony is, in fact, an enduring characteristic of Swift's writing. It derives in part from his sense that culture in his time was losing its classical moorings, in part from his status as 'different' (Irish in an English context, a celibate Protestant clergyman whose writing features sexual innuendo, old-fashioned in an innovative age), in part from his playfulness with language; and it has led some commentators to regard Swift as self-contradictory throughout his career. Swift himself embraced some of the contradictions (he was aware of and did not disdain his reputation as a cloacal and sexual humourist, though this had cost impeded his advancement in his career), and in our time these are more commonly regarded as complexities or sophistications offset by his deceptively straightforward manner of writing.