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2004
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Galway
and Irish Writing
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Reading Swift in Context
Jonathan
Swift’s mastery of ironies and ambivalences is often a matter of his
simultaneously genuine attachment to traditional values, including
those which characterised the British domination of Ireland in his
day, and attraction to ideas that came, long after his day, to supplant
such values. This panel hence considers Swift the writer as at once
classical and experimental, Swift the polemicist as both resenting
and promoting English imperialism.
Panel
Convenor:
Professor
Robert Mahony, Catholic University of America.
Speakers:
1. Dr. Christopher Jon Fauske, (Salem State College) “Misunderstanding
what Swift Understood: Ireland, Coinage and the Literature of the
Age”
2. Dr. Ann Cline Kelly, (Howard University, Washington, D.C) “Gulliver’s
Talking to Horses: Evidence of Madness or Sanity?: A New Look at Book
IV”
3. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Zach (University of Innsbruck) “Jonathan Swift
and the Anglicization of Ireland”
ABSTRACTS
Dr.
Christopher Jon Fauske, (Salem State College)
“Misunderstanding what Swift Understood: Ireland, Coinage and the
Literature of the Age”
Jonathan Swift wrote on the cusp of fundamental changes in
the understanding of economic processes and theories. While some,
at least, of his reading suggests that he was aware of the ideas which
would later emerge as the initial theories of modern-day economics,
his public writings appear nonetheless to draw very explicitly on
traditional mercantilist precepts. Two misreadings of Swift have resulted
from this positioning of Swift: First, modern readers who seldom have
an understanding of the radical disconnect between mercantilist theory
and economic theory read Swift as if he were making an argument that
he is not making, and which he knows he is not making. Second, later
generations of critics, such as Hazlitt, Shelley, and Michael Foot,
have chosen, often as knowingly as Swift chose his fiscal language,
to read Swift as if he were making a politico-economic argument with
which they agree even as they know he would not share their sympathies.
This has the ironic consequence of confusing even more than he intended
the matter of just what it was Swift understood of the economic conditions
of his time.
With a debt to both Joseph Johnston and Patrick Kelly for its economic
thinking, this paper discusses other literary works of the period
of Swift and explores some of the more knowing misreadings of Swift
by later radicals to seek to identify ways of understanding what Swift
did and did not about fiscal affairs and how he wished to be understood
when commenting on those matters.
Dr.
Ann Cline Kelly, (Howard University, Washington,
D.C) “Gulliver’s Talking to Horses: Evidence of Madness or Sanity?:
A New Look at Book IV”
The current idea is that the future belongs to the “cyborg,”
defined by Donna Harraway as one unbound by artificial categories
such as sex, species, race or binaries such as human/non-human, animate/inanimate.
While ideas of fluid and hybrid identity may seem to epitomize the
post-modern moment, they are in fact ancient archetypes embodied,
for example, by talking animals such as the snake in the Garden of
Eden as well as the gods masquerading as animals or half-human/half-animal
creatures such as the satyr found in classical myth. In the Restoration
and eighteenth century, defining the categories of being,” especially
the line between man and animal, took on a new urgency, reasons for
which have been analyzed by a number of recent scholars. It is enlightening
to read Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels in relationship to Restoration
and eighteenth-century discourse and practice concerning man-animal
relationships, particularly those with pets (known in politically
correct times as "companion animals." Several scholars associate
the onset of widespread pet-keeping with the onset of modernity, in
that it called into question whether the limitations that defined
animals (lack of reason, lack of speech, lack of feeling) were valid.
In that light, Gulliver’s relationship with the Houyhhnmland horses
and his English horses demonstrates Swift’s engagement with the vexing
issues raised by traditional species boundaries and implies that Gulliver,
far from being a misanthropic madman, is successful in salving his
psychic wounds by the use of what is now called "equitherapy."
Prof.
Dr. Wolfgang Zach (University of Innsbruck) “Jonathan Swift and the
Anglicization of Ireland”
The linguistic Anglicization of Ireland went through several
phases that began with attacks on the Irish language, its devaluation
and erosion, included the expulsion of Irish speakers from their homes
and their resettlement in the West of Ireland in the 17th century,
and led to the acceptance of the substitution of English for Irish
among the great majority of the Irish people in the first half of
the 19th century. The early 18th century was one of transition, and
only few of the prominent Anglo-Irish writers dealt with the Anglicization
of the Irish in their works - but one of them certainly did: Jonathan
Swift.
In this
paper, Jonathan Swift's attitude towards the Anglicization of Ireland,
and especially his attitude towards the roles of the Irish and the
English languages will be reviewed. It will be attempted to show the
reasons why, even in the most recent publications on the topic, opinions
of scholars are as diverse as possible, and why Swift's attitude towards
Irish is defined as admiration and support, on the one hand, and as
contempt as well as advocating its abolition, on the other. It is
particularly in two of his essays that Swift deals with the Irish
language and its abolition, which are interpreted in these contrasting
ways. I want to analyze what has been causing scholars to construct
the meaning of these texts in completely different ways. I will also
attempt to reinterpret these essays by applying all the relevant cultural
but epecially writerly aspects (esp. Swift's view of and uses of language(s),
his attitude towards the reader, multivalent discourse, and especially
his use of masks and ironies, etc.) to these texts.
It is
hoped that the riddle of Swift's attitude towards Irish and the Anglicization
of Ireland can be explained, and maybe solved, in this paper.
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