gullivers travel :: essays research papers

I want to outline in this essay some of the ways in which brisks texts - in particular the shorter prose civilizes and the poetry concerned with the female consistence - take up and make explicit contradictory philosophical sites. frequently time and critical effort has been spent undertakeing to trace some integrative philosophical thread through the maze created by these and other of Swifts writings, when such(prenominal) a thread may be elusive to the point of vanishing altogether.1 It seems potential that one cause of this critical need to establish consistency in Swift is the influence of Postmodernist thought, which tends to cause a conditioned retort to eighteenth century literary works in which the instinctive drift is to look for that which totalizes, compartmentalizes, reveals a master narrative or supplies a understandably defined linear teleology. If, however, this kind of pre-imagined consistency proves unavailable, the critic is left with the judgement of a m ulti-vocal, polychromatic Swift which should not, perhaps, be so surprising as there seems nothing alien to the intellectual trends of early-eighteenth century England in Swifts confidence of positions that appear radic all in ally opposed to one another. Periods of transition necessarily call for the existence of contradictory positions in constellation often within the work of a single writer or thinker. Even Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest of all icons of Enlightenment rationality, can be represented in such a way "Newton was a Janus figure, emblematic of the new, rationalist, scientific and secular future, but also using his mathematical skills for abstruse astrological and biblical calculations." (Corfield, 11). all the way any attempt to attribute a definitive philosophical position to Swift is fraught with difficulty.2 Not only must the reader attempt to penetrate multiple levels of irony at a micro-level, but at a macro-level the fact that Swift was an Anglican cl ergyman complicates any philosophical interpretation. The origins of the debates on this issue are contemporaneous with the publication of the texts themselves (William Wottons observations, for example), and criticism up to the end of the nineteenth century continued, predominately, to insist on an ir spiritual Swift an approach that survived into the twentieth century "no defence of Swifts fundamental religious orthodoxy can stand the test of such writings. He is a speculative humanist who again and again tilts at Christian belief". (Wilson Knight, on "The Tale of a Tub",124). This strain of criticism has been long overtaken, however, by