Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal
MWF 11:00-11:50 l Girvetz 1004 l
office hours: M 11-12, W 2-3l office:
South Hall 2503 l 893-3349
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ecook@english.ucsb.edu
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TAs: Billy Hall
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Paxton Hehmeyer l
Alex McKee l
Laura Miller
SATIRE: medley or stew, mixture – what’s being mixed here?
BACKGROUND: Ireland first conquered by England in 1171; under English control into 20th c. After conquest, estates confiscated from Irish Catholic families were given to English Protestant families. Many of these became “absentee” landlords, living in England on money produced by their estates. Huge Catholic majority living in Ireland were 2d-class citizens: could not vote, hold government offices, attend state-funded universities, etc (as in England).
1698: new law that Ireland trade EXCLUSIVELY with England. Implications: no possibility of international trade, or of bargaining for higher prices for its goods.
Jonathan Swift: born in Ireland of English parents; some back-and-forthing. Denied being Irish, though he spent only a total of ten years of his life in England. Became clergyman in Church of Ireland (branch of Church of England, so Anglican), ending as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
Published treatises and pamphlets about England’s ongoing exploitation of Ireland, specifically criticizing those English Protestant landlords who charged the highest possible rents from the Irish farmers (“rack rent”) to support expensive lifestyles in London.
Features of “The Modest Proposal” to consider
**If “satire” is a mix or stew, what’s being mixed or (ugh) stewed here??
The narrator or “projector” (someone proposing a project/theory) mixes vocabularies or jargons from different ways of thinking about human beings.
Exercise: How many different “jargons” or specialized vocabularies can you identify in the treatise?
The various fields of knowledge represented by the different jargons mix various ways of thinking about human beings: humans as
1) individuals, psychological subjects, attachment-forming beings
2) units, statistics
3) commodities
**How is the idea of family redefined in this treatise? What happens to relations among family members when children are redefined as commodities?
When do you begin to realize that the narrator defines some key words differently than you do?
Swift’s message: perversions of language = perversions of reason = perversions of ethics (World Upside Down)