Concetti Chiave
- Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" explores contrasts between reason and instinct, satirizing both modern scholarship and society's corruption.
- The Lilliputians symbolize systematic reason, while Gulliver represents instinct, showcasing Swift's critique of humanity's pettiness and littleness.
- Swift introduces the Brobdingnagians, giants who highlight the absurdities of human vanity and the dangers of unchecked reason.
- In Laputa, Swift mocks scientific hubris through absurd experiments, emphasizing the loss of common sense in contemporary society.
- The Houyhnhnms, rational horses, serve as a critique of human failings, with Swift highlighting the natural life versus societal corruption.
The Defense of the Classics
Battle of Books in which he supported Temple’s defence of classics and mocked the modern scholarship. A tale of tub, about the contrasts between Catholics and dissenters. When Jonathan Swift was priest, he denounced how many injustices that Ireland suffered.
His masterpiece was Gulliver’s travels and A Modest Proposal. Swift’s target was not only to England, but it was directed to Irish too, who seemed too passive in their misfortune.
The structure is:
- Book 1:He sails from Bristol and shipwrecked into a south pacific shore and he falls asleep. The inhabitants (Lilliputians) are only six inches tall and carried his huge body to their capital.
- Book 2:He shipwrecks in a place Swift located in Alaska. The inhabitants (Brobdingnag) are giants twelve times taller than Gulliver. During this period he has trampled nearly to death: he must escape from rats as big as lions and wasps as big as birds. He is sent to the royal palace and becomes King’s pet. After a while, his cage is lifted up by a huge bird and dropped into the ocean.
- Book 3: He meets in the island of laputa absent-minded astronomers and scientists. Their experiments consist in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers or turning humans excrement into food.
- Book 4: He meets some horses endowed with reason (Houyhnhnms) and a bad species of animals resembling human being. He is ashamed of his similarity with the Yahoos and he builds a canoe and comes back to England, where he re-sees his wife and his children. Then he goes living into stable, because he cannot stand human smell.
Jonathan Swift showed the life of these inhabitants as an uncorrupted life, in which they followed their natural instincts. Then he compared this model of natural life with the contemporary society which loses common sense and falls into a state of corruption, showed in the ridiculous experiments leaded by the mad scientists, who stand the modern man which used too intensively the reason.
Satire of Human Reason
In this pass Gulliver was supervised by two little officers. The Lilliputians stand for the systematic use of reason opposed to the big body of Gulliver, which stand for instinctivity. Jonathan Swift satirized man’s pettiness and littleness.
Gulliver meets three professors which want to create a new language form constituted by monosyllabic word, exclusively nouns, deleting all the verb and the preposition. It implies the advantage on preventing the lungs from corrosion due to the speech. Women and common people opposed the scientist.
Jonathan Swift satirized the intensive reason of scientist and believed more on common sense. A big satire of the absurdities of the scientist is upon the wafer, which is so disgusting that the student discharge it before it could operate.
Swift was concerned with the aberration of human reason.
Domande da interrogazione
- What was Jonathan Swift's stance on the classics versus modern scholarship?
- How does "Gulliver's Travels" reflect Swift's views on human society and reason?
- What is the significance of the Lilliputians in Swift's satire?
- How does Swift critique scientific endeavors in his works?
Jonathan Swift supported the defense of the classics and mocked modern scholarship, as highlighted in his work "Battle of Books."
"Gulliver's Travels" uses satire to compare uncorrupted natural life with contemporary society's corruption, criticizing the absurdities of human reason and the overuse of systematic reasoning.
The Lilliputians represent the systematic use of reason, contrasting with Gulliver's instinctive nature, highlighting man's pettiness and the absurdity of over-reliance on reason.
Swift satirizes scientific endeavors by depicting ridiculous experiments and absurd ideas, such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, to emphasize the folly of excessive reliance on reason over common sense.
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