Jonathan Swift
What can
you tell
me about
Jonathan
Swift?
Get out or open up your Satire Handouts
Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation.
It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire "derides"; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt existing outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in "personal satire"), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even (as in Rochester's "A Satyr against Mankind," 1675, and much of Swift's Gulliver's Travels… M.H. Abrams
Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as a corrective of human vice and folly; Alexander Pope (your next reading) remarked that "those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous."
Jonathan Swift (about himself)
Yet malice never was his aim;�He lashed the vice, but spared the name.
His satire points at no defect,�But what all mortals may correct....�He spared a hump, or crooked nose,�Whose owners set not up for beaux.
Give me some modern examples of satire
What is being satirized?
What is being satirized?
What is being satirized?
What is being satirized?
What is being satirized?
oooooooo……
meta
Ok – get out a sheet of paper and your reading.��������
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Find as many examples as you can of SPECIFIC targets of Swift’s satire.��Row 1 & 2: 502-504�
Row 3 & 4: 505-506�
Row 5: 507-508��������
Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Some targets I found…
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Why is it easy to read & discuss “A Modest Proposal”?
Far removed us – Irish 300 years ago
People get offended, the closer it is to
their lives.
What are some problems with satire?
Who is it aimed at?
Who gets it?
Does everyone get it? Why/Why not?
President Obama New Yorker cover
What are some problems with satire?
Does everyone get it? Why/Why not?
Jonathan Swift
“Satire is a sort of glass [mirror], wherein�beholders do generally discover�everybody’s face but their own”
A very timely example
The Satire Pardox with Malcolm Gladwell
If you can print out the chart – �otherwise, do it on a sheet of paper.