Satire in the Time of Genocide: a diffractive reading of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) through Israel’s gendered settler-colonial practices in Palestine

Satirizing the Blood Libel:Ritual Cannibalism, Infant Sacrifice, and Bloodied Knives in "A Modest Proposal" Lori A. Davis Perry (bio) The ritual butchering of Irish children for profit, celebrated as a reasonable economic program that will benefit all concerned in Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," suggests a moral vacuum on the part of the narrator that appalls modern readers. Claude Rawson has argued that the pamphlet targets the Irish simultaneously as a despised and identifiable subgroup and as rhetorical shorthand for the more universal "generalized savage" (3). Swift's contemporary readers, however, would have been subjected to an additional source of unease, for the pamphlet censures the ruling classes through pointed references to anti-Semitic tropes by alluding directly to the Blood, Conspiracy, and Economic Libels, the oldest and most dangerous libels against Jews. His Projector proposes an economic program in which Anglo cultural and national identity are transformed to reflect the most viral accusations against the Jews, thereby reversing centuries of moral posturing that depended to a large degree upon a perceived cultural distance from any and all elements of Judaism. The pamphlet thus translates fears of cultural, religious, and racial conflations between Anglo Christians and Jews into a potential reality, as traditional accusations against mythologized Jews become realized as proposed economic policy. Critical attention to anti-Semitism in British literature tends to focus primarily on either the medieval and early modern periods or the nineteenth century to the present. While Anglo-Jewish historians have paid some attention to the eighteenth century, as a general rule literary critics of philoor anti-Semitism have glossed over the period.1 In part, the absence of large Jewish populations in Britain, and their corresponding absence as overt literary characters, has encouraged literary critics to presume a level of cultural indifference, or even amnesia, about Jews among Swift's readers. Yet the absence of a large Jewish population had little effect upon British ideas about Jews; traditional narratives about Jews, no matter how fanciful, superstitious, [End Page 119] or contradicted by evidence, had been asserted in the British Isles and Europe for centuries, developing into a well-formed, long-lasting mythology that continues even into the current era. During Swift's lifetime, anti-Semitic tropes were so familiar as to be accepted nearly without question by readers throughout the British Isles, and formed the everyday knowledge, common opinions, and received ideas of what Roland Barthes describes as the cultural code. Indeed, the Anglo response to the idea of a Jew infuses not simply the literature but the language itself. Whether scholars, diplomats, travelers, or simply tradesmen and farmers, Swift's readers demonstrate a deep-seated awareness of libels against Jews and a corresponding concept of Judaism as antithetical to Anglo identity and culture. "A Modest Proposal" mines this knowledge for its satirical impact. European hatred toward Jews had increased dramatically in the eleventh century, culminating in the Rhineland massacres of 1096. Thereafter, murder accusations against Jews became routine, developing formal conventions over time. The first accusation of ritual murder by crucifixion appeared in Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich in 1150. Ritual murder accusations (without the accusation of crucifixion) then appeared in Würzburg (1147), Gloucester (1168), Blois (1171), Bury St. Edmunds (1181) and Winchester (1192); inspired by Monmouth, later writers added crucifixion accusations as a matter of course (Langmuir 209-36, 263-81, 282, 298.). Ritual murder accusations spread quickly through Britain and France, but the accusation of cannibalism first appeared in Fulda Germany in 1235, where on Christmas Day, a miller and his wife went to church and returned to find their mill burnt down and the bodies of their five sons in the ruins. The Jews of Fulda, sixty miles north, confessed, presumably under torture, that two of them had killed the boys and drained their blood into bags, to be consumed for religious and/or medicinal purposes. As a result, thirty-four Jews were condemned to mass execution. Thus, the Blood Libel, which conflated ritual child murder and cannibalism, became widespread throughout Europe. After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 adopted Transubstantiation as official Church doctrine, a Host Desecration Libel arose, in...

<i>A Modest Proposal</i> is a representative work of Jonathan Swift. Many critics think it a greatest satirical work ever written. Jonathan Swift has always been considered a political writer and poet. His plain style can also been seen in <i>A Modest Proposal</i> but it's not the main concern of this thesis. This thesis mainly focuses on some artistic features of the famous pamphlet. One characteristic of this essay is about the discussion of the persuasive devices used by Jonathan Swift. And some rhetorical devices and themes are also discussed in this thesis. In the end, the general idea of this thesis is concluded.

This paper attempts to make a stylistic analysis of Jonathan Swift’s registers in A Modest Proposal . In literary writing, a writer chooses his words with care, making sure that the words fit properly into the discourse. This proper choice and use of words is ‘diction’. In carrying out the subtle task of ensuring proper diction, most writers often search for relevant technical terms appropriate to their discourse with a view to achieving realism. Thus, a writer becomes a roving camera, delving into other disciplines so as to achieve this realism. Using the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), it is discovered that Swift achieves profound literary realism in A Modest Proposal through appropriate diction and navigation in various registers to the extent that one is prone to conclude that Swift’s profession is multi-dimensional in nature, a positive chameleon in terms of his calling; indeed a literary rainbow with several appearances. Though a single human being, he is discovered to be a man of many diverse parts through his diction that cuts across nine professions/disciplines. He is a literary writer who delves into various professions simultaneously to have an organic unity which natural novels have in common. This paper therefore submits that A Modest Proposal is a literary work that exemplifies convergence adjustment aspect of the Communication Accommodating Theory of Howard Giles as a means of effective communication in literary writing. Keywords: Communication Accommodation Theory, Register, Profession, Diction DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-16-04 Publication date: August 31 st 2021

Reviewed by: Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-In, and: Jonathan Swift: Our Dean by Eugene Hammond Brean S. Hammond Eugene Hammond. Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-In and Jonathan Swift: Our Dean. Newark: Delaware, 2016. Pp. xxiv + 797. $140. Pp. xviii + 821. $140. Toward the close of this biography's second volume, Mr. Hammond cites a reference that Swift wrote for a servant, surprising because it was written in 1740 when Swift is usually said to have lost the fight against what we would probably now diagnose as Alzheimer's: "The bearer served me the space of one year, during which time he was an idler and a drunkard; I then discharged him as such; but how far his having been five years at sea may have mended his manners, I leave to the penetration of those who may hereafter chuse to employ him." As Mr. Hammond comments, "No one but Swift could have written this letter. No one could have written it for him. It captures his characteristic style and temperament as well as any piece its length." Just so. It is a tribute to the quality of the biographer's complete familiarity with his subject that he can focus on a gem like this. Quietly, it compels us to reassess Swift's "senility" and to perceive that it was not unpunctuated by periods of perfect lucidity. Irish Blow-In covers the first forty-seven years of its subject's life, breaking off at the predictable point in August 1714 when Queen Anne has just died, the Tory ministry has fallen, and Swift has returned disconsolately to Ireland where he will have another thirty-one years to live and will write the works for which he is principally remembered: The Drapier's Letters, A Modest Proposal, and Gulliver's Travels. Since the second volume proposes that the real turning point in Swift's life actually came later, it is a pity that Mr. Hammond did not flout convention by splitting the volumes in 1718: "Once [Swift] fully realized in 1718 that Oxford did not want the two of them to march hand in hand to posterity, Swift's personality suffered a seismic shift." Swift's Irish fate was sealed, Mr. Hammond argues, by the death of his hope that Lord Oxford would recall him to service—namely, the joint compilation of what Swift believed would be the definitive historical record of the events of 1710–1714. Everything Swift thought, wrote, and did after 1718 was, in a sense, displacement activity. The really shocking implication here is that the two principal women in his life, the two Esthers, were also thus a displacement activity. Swift's fawning and pathetic solicitation of Oxford after the latter's release from the Tower suggests that he would have abandoned the ladies in Ireland, whither they had followed him, at the drop of that peer's tricorn hat. Mr. Hammond's stated intention for this massive biography—a labour of love that has taken decades to complete—is to capture "how it felt to Swift himself to live his life." Fortunately he does not execute this intention in its psychologistic dimension. Rather, his overriding concern is that which has obsessed Swift biographers since Orrery and Deane Swift: in what did Swift's greatness as a writer consist and how does that relate to his moral character? Can Swift have been a great writer if he was not a good man? Hammond offers this verdict: "Swift's originality is to this day the most foundational reason for his still being remembered and enjoyed as a writer, and it is what he liked about himself as a writer. For much of his life, he disdained the ordinary way of doing anything." One [End Page 53] might situate the source of Swift's originality in the evidence that he was not in any conventional sense a good man—that he was an extremist, even judged by the standards of his time. Inconsistently perhaps, Mr. Hammond expends much effort seeking to demonstrate that Swift's intentions were usually moral, or at the very least excusable, thus threatening to return him to middle-of-the-road moderation: I do...

This chapter explores the classical form of the essay; the ethical proof; the use of the two major rhetorical devices, diminution and refining; and the less frequently used devices. Jonathan Swift's best and most popular ironical essay, Modest Proposal, reveals Swift at once as master ironist and master classical rhetorician. The narration contains the statement of the proposal, with some further preparation for the proof. A revolutionary new proposal is insinuated in a traditional, respected form. The steady reiteration of man-to-animal diminution tends to establish it in the reader's consciousness as a norm, and thus the rhetorical device becomes one of the means of establishing the ironic norm of the essay. The rhetorical device is, however, usually meant to name an extended set piece of description. Modest Proposal is a brilliant example of the use of non-argumentative devices of rhetorical persuasion.

The great English writer, Jonathan Swift (1965), wrote an essay entitled “A Modest Proposal,” in which he suggested that the Irish could reduce the famine then plaguing their country by eating their young children. The result was, not surprisingly, an uproar against Swift for his sarcasm and indifference toward the suffering of the Irish people. The title of this chapter is borrowed from Swift because the “modest proposals” suggested in this chapter may seem hostile to some.

Jonathan Swift was born in 1667. He has been called the greatest satirist in the English language. We are all familiar with hisGulliver's Travels. A Modest Proposal has been acclaimed as the outstanding short satire in English. Swift merged a career as churchman with that of a satirist and political journalist. He spent much of his life in Ireland and England, but after he was installed as Dean of St. Patricks Cathedral in Dublin in 1713 he more and more began to write about conditions in Ireland.A Modest Proposal is from this period. It combines a rational tone and a concern for the betterment of all with an unsavory solution to the problems of Ireland's poor children. Swift's satire can be so sharp and unyielding that he was variously judged to be insane, to have a disorder of the intellect, to be a hater of humanity. Mental failings in his later years encouraged his critics. Today the power of his satire is undiminished, but that does not prevent us from enjoying his humor or from admiring his humanity. In our own time, when so many children seem to be “eaten up” by the conditions of their lives,A Modest Proposal is as powerful a denunciation as it was in 1720.

This article reads A Modest Proposal from the darker side of the westernised/anglicised Enlightenment. Firstly, it critically engages with the proclivity within the Anglocentric academy to celebrate English language literary figures associated with “The Enlightenment” in Ireland without a questioning of their role in the colonial project and in shaping its discourses of racism and sexism. Secondly, it focuses on how, from an Irish decolonial perspective, Jonathan Swift can be understood as a manager of the colonial racial/patriarchal matrix of power. Thirdly, it argues that the satire written by Jonathan Swift should be understood as an Anglocentric geo-cultural category and may be understood as westernised/anglicised Enlightenment satire. Finally, A Modest Proposal is analysed in terms of the exceptionality principle of irony, Swift’s project of improvement and salvation of the colonised, and modernity/coloniality’s rhetorical promise yet inability to solve the problems it produces.

Jonathan Swift, "Master of Controversy" Ashley Marshall (bio) John Stubbs Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel New York: W. W. Norton, 2017 752 pages; isbn: 9780393239423 john stubbs's subtitle eloquently captures a fundamental truth about Jonathan Swift, in many ways a deeply conservative man who was compelled by circumstances to take up his pen in bitter opposition to the establishment. Swift's halcyon years were 1710–14, when he served as leading propagandist for Queen Anne's last ministry and fancied himself a ministerial insider, a role that suited his ideological disposition far better than that of oppositional gadfly. F. P. Lock's conclusion rings true: "By temperament and conviction he was conservative and authoritarian; an accident of history made him a patron and champion of liberty" in the last quarter century of his active life.1 Swift is best known now as the trenchant author of Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729), as well as the Drapier who wrote so boldly against English exploitation and abuse of Ireland. In popular imagination, Swift is all rebel with little reluctance, a fearless advocate of liberty against tyranny; in reality, he more often expressed anxiety about populism than about absolutism, sounding warnings about the dangers of overmuch freedom and defending the prerogatives of the monarch and the Church of England. Stubbs mostly seems to appreciate this inner conflict, as his titular epithet suggests, though he highlights it surprisingly little in his actual coverage of Swift's life and ideas. The reversal in Swift's political fortunes and political outlook after Anne's death and his exile to Ireland in 1714 is explained but not particularly emphasized—perhaps regrettable, given the centrality of that reversal to Swift's entire sense [End Page 157] of the world and his place within it. In his final paragraph, Stubbs at last alludes to his chosen epithet, pointing out that, though Swift became a "fighter and an avenger," it never theless "took a lot to make him turn on England, the kingdom he always claimed as his rightful home" (639). Swift's rebellion, then, is in Stubbs's telling a matter of his position vis-à-vis the country into which he wished he had been born, and in which he had hoped to find a permanent home. Stubbs's account has comparatively little to say about the partisan battle between Whig and Tory, about Swift's devastating sense of loss when the Tories failed to consolidate their power in the wake of Anne's death, or about his frustrated response to Whig ascendancy in the early years of George I's reign. This is not, of course, a political biography, but understanding the true nature of Swift's "reluctant rebellion" requires serious engagement with those evolving political circumstances and his attempts—as late as Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift—to reckon with them. That said, Stubbs's Jonathan Swift is an impressive piece of work. Swift has had more than his fair share of biographers, from Orrery (1751) to Irvin Ehrenpreis (1962–83) and, most recently, Leo Damrosch (2013) and Eugene Hammond (2016). Few fundamentals have gone uncontested. He has been described as a charitable benefactor and an egotist, as a conjured spirit and a hypocrite reversed; he is portrayed sometimes as a ruthless conqueror of the adoring Esther Johnson ("Stella") and Esther Vanhomrigh ("Vanessa"), and sometimes as a beleaguered but well-intentioned member of a love triangle only barely of his making. Biographers have disagreed about, among many other things, his relations with women, his religious convictions, his politics, and his mental health. The challenges for the biographer do not stop there. Swift was notoriously slippery and ironic, and even in that most intimate source, the so-called Journal to Stella, he is evasive. His own accounts of his life are many, and each is in its way untrustworthy. And because his vast canon comprises works that are highly topical, making his life and output comprehensible requires substantial explication of contextual circumstances—often political circumstances that are complex enough to leave even the best historians of the period a bit daunted. Stubbs has managed to offer a relatively full picture of...

This article focuses on how the capacity of diffractive readings is put to work in a study of two different types of visual material in research conducted in a preschool. The analysis with the help of –the language of the flat ontology– and the diffractive readings take place in educational research among three-year-olds. Children’s photographs and video recordings produced by the researcher are seen as data that both interfere with and affects the outcome of the study. Diffractive methodologies are used to connect the research and the two kinds of visual data with previous research, some theoretical concepts from Karen Barad’s agential realism and the researcher’s experience of becoming and learning throughout the development of the entangled research process.

Humanistic care is care that leads to quality of life. The viewpoint of nursing home residents is uniquely indicative of humanistic and dehumanizing care in nursing homes. Therefore, three books by nursing home residents about their experiences in nursing homes are examined in the context of three themes of humanization: control, privacy, and relationships. These insights are then translated into the model "Modest Proposal" Nursing Home, less infeasible than its Swiftian namesake and equally thought-provoking. Some persons of desponding Spirit are in great Concern about that vast Number of poor People, who are Aged, Diseased, or Maimed; and I have been desired to employ my thoughts what course may be taken, to ease the Nation of so grievous an Incumbrance. But I am not in the least Pain upon that Matter; because it is very well known, that they are every Day dying, and rotting, by Cold and Famine, and Filth, and Vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. (Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal)

Research Article| April 01 2005 John Graunt, Sir William Petty, and Swift's Modest Proposal Peter M. Briggs Peter M. Briggs Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2005) 29 (2): 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-29-2-3 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Peter M. Briggs; John Graunt, Sir William Petty, and Swift's Modest Proposal. Eighteenth-Century Life 1 April 2005; 29 (2): 3–24. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-29-2-3 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEighteenth-Century Life Search Advanced Search Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Jonathan Swift’s Irish writings are replete with sartorial imaginings that fashion his unique satirist self by interlacing, for mutual sub version, colonial discourse on Irish dress with a mock-Lockean idea of self as “outward Dress.” Swiftcontests the legacy of Edmund Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland (ca. 1596), a colonial attack on Irish dress that combined the Renaissance notion of dress generating identity by permeating the wearer and a more modern presumption of essential differences between the Irish and (New) English. Swift’s insight into Spenser’s contradictory logic penetrates Jack’s sartorial “Projects of Separation” from Peter in A Tale of a Tub (1704), and culminates later in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729) when Gulliver and the Modest Proposer, in deed or word, skin the Yahoos/Irish and literally turn them into shoes, in resonance with both William Wood’s contumely “eat [y]our Brogues” and Spenser’s View. By reversing and revamping the colonial sign of Irish dress, Swiftfashions and refashions his satirist self through a conscious mismatch of Anglican habit and Irish brogues.

Abstract: Israel's ongoing genocidal campaign in Palestine brings into critical focus the violence embedded in positivist notions of state sovereignty. The narrative highlights the devastating impact of the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation while critiquing the global justification and sustenance of Israel's genocidal campaign under the guise of "self-defense" and "national security." While Palestinian intellectuals and activists have effectively challenged these arguments, in this work I attend to the question of Palestinian liberation through a critique of the broader concept of statehood and sovereignty. In doing so I offer an intimate study of precolonial Hawaiian governing practices. By examining the practices of sanctuary via the institution of the Pu'uhonua (places of refuge), the author suggests an alternative framework where sovereignty can be reimagined, offering a vision that challenges the violent exclusionary practices traditionally associated with statehood. In engaging with these questions, readers are invited to reconsider the meanings of sovereignty in the context of ongoing struggles for collective freedom and liberation.

This article explores the unraveling of subjectivity under conditions of imperial and genocidal trauma. It does so by staging encounters between critical race theory, psychoanalytic and post/colonial approaches through a transnational Asian consideration of Cambodian and Palestinian documentary films made by Rithy Panh, Raed Andoni and Kamal Aljafari. In particular I consider the psychical-philosophical dimensions of picturing the unspeakable effects of war and genocide, both in terms of Global South filmmakers and participants, as well as theoretical audiences, especially via the notion of unraveling as it relates to Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the quilting point”, wherein signification is forged. Representations of trauma, particularly genocide, do not suture the spectator to an imaginary world, as per traditional psychoanalytic film theory; rather, they unquilt at its site/sight, leaving the spectator in a psychotic limbo. Finally, this article reworks Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by analyzing the political and phantasmatic structures sustaining the west’s silence about Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine.