The Power of Words in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

Exposé Philosophie & littérature Littérature

Date de publication :

25/07/2007

Langue :

Anglais

Format :

.doc

Nombre de pages :

8 pages

Niveau :

avancé

Consulté :

1 fois

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Sommaire :

Sommaire

The power of language and of communication in the novel -that is, spoken words
The strength of Gulliver's Travels as a book -explicitly, as a combination of written words. The universality of Swift's great novel
The power of Swift's own words -namely, imagined, thought and hidden words-

Résumé :

What is the common point between gulliver's conversation with the various people he encounters during his travels, swift's irony, and the book itself being considered as a fairy tale for children and a bitter satire of the government of England and of humankind as a whole at the same time? Those significant features were all made possible thanks to the power of words in its miscellaneous forms. Actually, words are ordinary things, but in gulliver's travels more than in any work of fiction, they are provided with extraordinary power. Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher, used to say that "without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men". We may reuse his sentence and adapt it to our problematic, stating that without knowing the power -and more significantly the powers, as we shall see- of words in gulliver's travels, it is impossible to understand neither the eponymous protagonist's message, nor that of the book proper, nor that, much more biting, of its author himself. Infuriated by the moral deficiency of society in the eighteenth century, Jonathan swift (1667 - 1745), often alluded to as the most controversial satirist in the history of English literature, wrote a plethora of bitter works, the most famous of which, gulliver's travels, being unsurprisingly referred to as the apex of his mastery of the art of parody.