English 201
Charles Knight
Paper
4
Write a 3-5 page
paper on one of the following topics.
Due May 6.
1. Gulliver and
Perspective. Gulliver's description
and evaluation of things change as his perspective changes. Look at one segment of Gulliver's Travels
to show how his perspective affects what he sees and how he reports it. (A segment could be as short as a chapter or
as long as a book.) To what degree does
Gulliver’s text (what he says) depend upon the nature of what he observes? To what degree does it depend on how he sees
it (that is, on his own conscious and unconscious attitudes and expectations)? What is the importance of perspective as part
of Swift's general approach to the writing of satire?
2. Distortion.
We get big people and little people, sorcerers and people who grow old forever,
rational horses and apish people. But we get very few ordinary people in Gulliver's
Travels. Does Swift's use of
distortion help him to get at the truth?
How? You might want to develop
your discussion of distortion in reference to one or two examples and then to
look at other instances to see if your conclusions apply there also.
3. The Topic of
War. War is a topic to which
Gulliver returns in most of his voyages. Gulliver's defeat of Blefescu in I, v,
his description of gunpowder in II, vii, his observation of past military
figures in III, vii and viii, and his general description of European war and
weaponry in IV, v are the most obvious examples. What are Gulliver's attitude towards war, the attitudes of the
beings to whom he talks, and Swift's attitude?
Does a discussion of this topic help you to arrive at some more general
conclusions about Gulliver's Travels?
What does Swift’s treatment of war say about his attitude towards human
beings?
4. Language. Gulliver describes the basic characteristics
of the languages of several of the countries he visits. Compare those languages to find the cultural
and moral assumptions that are embodied in each and to reveal Swift's general
attitudes towards language. (You might
also consider the language experiments at the Academy of Lagado, described in
III, v.) Why is language an important
topic for Swift's satire?
5. The Dislocated
Reader. The interpretation of Gulliver's
Travels, especially Book IV, is a matter on which otherwise reasonable
people differ quite widely. One way of
reacting to these very different interpretations is to talk about the
"dislocated reader" of Gulliver's Travels--the reader who is
not allowed to rest comfortably with his or her conclusions but instead finds
them undercut by new events, situations, and characters as the story goes
on. Discuss the idea that the reader
here is continually being frustrated by the book. Does this notion of the dislocated reader help us to interpret Gulliver's
Travels or to deal with the apparent fact that it can be interpreted in so
many different ways?
6. Houyhnhnms. Readers interpret Gulliver’s friends the rational horses in a
number of different ways. Some see the
Houyhnhnms as representing an ideal of life, though such readers may disagree
as to whether it is possible for humans to imitate that ideal. Others see Houyhnhnms as good but, like all
things, subject to corruption. Still
others find the Houyhnhnms as narrow and, in their own way, as evil as the
Yahoos (but funnier), and such readers argue that Gulliver is grossly misled in
thinking himself a Yahoo and in admiring the Houyhnhnms. Where do you stand, amid these
alternatives? How do you justify your
position (rather than the alternatives)?
7. Misanthropy. In 1725, just before the publication of Gulliver's
Travels, Swift wrote the following passage in a letter to Alexander
Pope. Does what Swift says about his
views here really help us to interpret Gulliver's Travels? If it does, how and why does it? In what respects might it be inadequate as a
guide to interpretation? What connections
can we make between what Swift says here and what he does in his book? (I have cleaned up the very odd punctuation
and spelling of the original.)
I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my
love is towards individuals. For instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I
love Counselor such-a-one, Judge such-a-one; for so with physicians (I will not
speak of my own trade), soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that
animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so
forth. This is the system upon which I
have governed my self many years (but do not tell), and so I shall go on till I
have done with them. I have got
materials towards a treatise proving the falsity of that definition "animal
rationale," and to show that it should be only "rationis capax." Upon this great foundation of misanthropy
(though not in Timon's manner) the whole foundation of my "Travels"
is erected.
["Animal
rationale . . . rationis capax": not "a rational
animal" but "an animal capable of reason." Timon, a character in one of Lucian's
dialogues and in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, lost his money primarily
by giving away large amounts of it to his friends, who in turn would not help
him when he was broke; after his fortune was restored by the God Zeus, he took
a bitterly negative attitude towards the friends and hangers-on who came back
to seek more handouts.]