Showing posts with label Jonathan Swift. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonathan Swift. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Sunday, May 7, 2023
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Gulliver's travels
STRANGE EXPERIMENTS IN
LAPUTA
·
· There is a project to extract sunbeams from
cucumbers
·
A scientist tries to turn excrement back into
food
·
Another is attempting to turn ice into gunpowder
and is writing a treatise about the malleability of fire,
·
An architect is designing a way to build houses
from the roof down
·
A blind master is teaching
his blind apprentices to mix colors for painters according to smell and touch.
·
A doctor in another room tries to cure patients
by blowing air through them.
·
One professor has a class full of boys working
from a machine that produces random sets of words. Using this machine, the
teacher claims, anyone can write a book on philosophy or politics.
·
A linguist in another room is attempting to
remove all the elements of language except nouns.
·
Another professor tries to teach mathematics by
having his students eat wafers that have mathematical proofs written on them.
·
Another claims that conspiracies against the
government could be discovered by studying the excrement of subjects.
The academy of LAGADO serves to create entirely useless projects while
the people starve outside its walls.
The result is a society in which science is promoted for no real reason
and time is wasted as a matter of course.
SYMBOLS
The Lilliputians symbolize humankind’s
wildly excessive pride in its own puny (weak) existence.
The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private,
personal, and physical side of humans when examined up close and in great
detail.
The Laputans represent the folly of
theoretical knowledge that has no relation to human life and no use in the
actual world.
The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal of
rational existence, a life governed by sense and moderation of which philosophers
since Plato have long dreamed. They have no names in the narrative nor any need
for names, since they are virtually interchangeable, with little individual
identity
ENGLAND all the races Gulliver
encounters could be versions of the English and that his travels merely allow
him to see various aspects of human nature more clearly
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Thursday, May 11, 2017
Sunday, April 17, 2016
INTERPRETATIONS GULLIVER's TRAVELS
INTERPRETATIONS
GULLIVER's TRAVELS
IT’S A
POLITICAL ALLEGORY
1) FIRST
JOURNEY
GREED
CORRUPTION
PROVINCIALISM
They
see GULLIVER as a weapon to destroy
their enemies
Swift refers to some political
figures of his time The
idea is that they do nothing in the public interest
2)SECOND JOURNEY
The giants of BROBDINGNAG VANITY
PRIDE
SELF-LOVE
Gulliver sees how the Lilliputians
saw him The idea
is that the human body may be an obstacle to SPIRITUAL GROWTH
3)THIRD JOURNEY
It’s a SATIRE against the new theories
and abstract thought
In particular Swift attacks the
ROYAL SOCIETY (THE OLDEST SCIENTIFIC ACADEMY)
4)FOURTH JOURNEY
The HOUYHNHNMS are HORSES REASON
LOGIC
RESPECT
The YAHOOS are men-like apes (a SUB_HUMAN RACE) The idea is that underneath humans are indeed just like the Yahoos, only a bit more sophisticated in their being rough and violent
Simple Definition of ALLEGORY
a story in which the
characters and events are symbols that stand for ideas about human life or for
a political or historical situation
Simple
Definition of satire
a way of using humor to show that someone or something is foolish, weak,
bad, etc. : humor that shows the weaknesses or bad qualities of a person,government, society, etc.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)