Language at Work in Jonathan Swift

PhD ThesisLanguage is not a simple bridge from thought to meaning: it has a constitutive function of its own, and its effects should be considered along with the ideas it conveys. The language of Jonathan Swift illustrates this point exactly, because of its mode of operation. In the Swiffian text language is always at work; involved in processes of questioning and reshaping its contents, and our reading of them. Swift's writing enacts, as much as it states, and the reader must be attentive to this process, if the full impact of the texts is to be measured. My project in this thesis is to analyse how language operates in the major works, and the outcome of its activity. In each chapter, I consider how relevant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas of language impact on, and are affected by, Swift's language; as well as his amenability to current ideas in theories of language. First, seventeenth-century attempts to reform and purge language are measured against Swift's handful of explicit statements on the subject; and although there are points of convergence, I conclude that it is more productive to study Swift's less conventional experiments with language than to assemble a fitful philosophy from a few comments. The remaining chapters engage in this project. I assess A Tale of a Tub in relation to ideas of 'the book'—an opportunity to consider the complex interactions between authors, texts, and readers from the vantage point of an ideal of certainty and totality. The poetry is measured against the Augustan separation of 'sound' from 'sense', which founders when confronted with Swift's contemplation of the poetic object through excessive concentration on the body and its products. And Gulliver 's Travels represents an engagement with issues of fictionality and context, and how these affect the dispensation of meaning. Throughout these discussions, my intention is to establish that Swift's writing survives, and its future is assured, because of its interactive, interrogatory, self reflective nature

"No more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia" : Utopian satire in Gulliver's travels

This study provides the first book-length examination of Gulliver's Travels as a utopian work. Swift relies on the genre of the utopia for the structure of each of the book's four voyages and as a means to further his satire on human nature, English society, and utopianism itself. The first two chapters introduce to the reader the methods and vocabulary of Utopian Studies, the critical approach utilized in this dissertation. They lay the foundation for the later examination of Swift's complex manipulation of the genre by analyzing various definitions of utopia, by examining the connection between satire and the utopian tradition established by Thomas More, and by detailing aspects of the structure and themes of utopias that served as probable sources for Gulliver's Travels

Utopia vs. history: Jonathan Swift and the twentieth century

Summary available: p. v-viii

Linguistic Politeness in the Selected Works of Jonathan Swif

Politeness has been the common problem for all people in the world. People use language to communicate and to express their ideas. They need polite language to express themselves correctly and not to offend other people whom they talk to. This politeness problem has also been one of the concerns of the writers. As a result of power, age and gender, politeness is tried to be used in different context, different verbal interactions. It can be obviously seen in the most popular works of the world literature. The language that is used in that works indicates the manners of the particular time and it also helps to analyze those works linguistically. Politeness has been investigated many times from different perspectives, including literary works. As well as the works of Jonathan Swift have been subject for different type of linguistic analyses. However, these linguistic analyses do not include politeness aspect. Thus, the works of J. Swift will be the first one to be investigated from the politeness point of view. Politeness is obviously seen in the works of Jonathan Swift as one of the popular writers of 18th century. The main aim of this paper is to analyze the popular works of Jonathan Swift linguistically, to find the reason for such politeness in J. Swift’s works, to investigate and to explore politeness in different works of Jonathan Swift, like “A tale of tub”, “A modest proposal”, “Gulliver's Travels”

Fear of fiction: the authorial response to realism in selected works by Swift, Defoe, and Richardson

If Mrs. Whitehouse produced a pornographic play, it would arouse enormous interest, mainly because of Mrs. Whitehouse’s well known views on pornography. It is an ancient fact of English Literature that two of the best known pioneers of the English realistic novel, Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, were Puritans. And there is an almost equally ancient critical tradition which traces the easy path of Puritan literature, in combination with other cultural forces, towards the production of realistic fiction. The central argument of this thesis is that there was no such easy path. Puritan autobiography was unrealistic in its very nature, while Puritan feeling towards fiction was hostile, with realistic, or verisimilar fiction provoking most hostility because the most deceitful. Thus the writing of a realistic novel was a radical departure for the Puritan, and one that was fraught with tension. It is this tension, or fear of fiction, and its effects on work of the two Puritan novelists, and that odd Anglican Jonathan Swift, that is the subject of this thesis. Swift joins Defoe and Richardson as an author with a special relationship with Defoe, and himself closer to a fearful anti- mimetic "tradition" than the comic tradition in which he is usually placed alongside Fielding and Sterne. Selected works of the three authors reveal their struggle with the intense problems that realism created for them, and their eventual 'solutions'. Hence by the time that Dr. Johnson made his famous critical statement against the fearful potential of realism in his fourth Rambler [31 March 1750), he was actually formalising material that had been well examined in the fiction under discussion, rather than beating an original critical path in response to Fielding's supposedly 'new' verisimilar form