![]() ![]() ![]() No reader, no matter her personal values or political allegiances, will be able to take seriously the speaker’s proposal. In large part, the humor of “A Modest Proposal” arises from the enormous gap between the cool, rational, self-righteous voice of the speaker and the obvious repulsiveness of his proposal: that the infant children of Ireland’s poor be raised as livestock, slaughtered, and sold as food to the wealthy, who will enjoy them as a tasty delicacy. The power of Swift’s satire resides in the intensity of his verbal irony-that is, his ability to say one thing and mean precisely the opposite. ![]() Though Swift wrote the tract in response to the specific social conditions afflicting his native Ireland, its bitter humor shocks and delights as much now as it did in 1729, when it circulated the streets of Dublin as an anonymous pamphlet. Today we regard “A Modest Proposal” as a seminal work of Western satire-satire being the use of humor or irony to reveal and criticize the evils of society. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |