Browsing by Subject "Satire"

This dissertation investigates ancient language ideologies constructed by Greek and Latin writers of the second and third centuries CE, a loosely-connected movement now generally referred to the Second Sophistic. It focuses on Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian “barbarian” writer of satire and parody in Greek, and especially on his works that engage with language-oriented topics of contemporary relevance to his era. The term “language ideologies”, as it is used in studies of sociolinguistics, refers to beliefs and practices about language as they function within the social context of a particular culture or set of cultures; prescriptive grammar, for example, is a broad and rather common example. The surge in Greek (and some Latin) literary output in the Second Sophistic led many writers, with Lucian an especially noteworthy example, to express a variety of ideologies regarding the form and use of language. A number of authors, including Lucian, practiced Atticism, the belief that the best literature wouldn be made possible by reviving the Attic dialect of Classical Athens, language of Plato and Aristophanes. Others, however, disagree with the narrow and perhaps pretentious version of Greek this ideology produced; intriguingly Lucian was a member of this group as well. This study examines Lucian’s complex and contradictory attitudes towards linguistic practices, focusing the works of his that address Atticism and other linguistic topics—such as the degree to which mastery of a language and its culture will allow one to identify with that culture. Here, too, Lucian portrays the relationship between linguistic practice and cultural identity in several different ways. Investigations into the linguistic views of other authors of the period help answer the question of which contemporary ideologies Lucian may be drawing on for his satire. The dissertation concludes that the detailed, specific humor of Lucian’s linguistic satire is tied into his overall project of creating a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and linguistic position for the self-representation of his disparate personae.

"Scriblerian Ethics" proposes that the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of the writings of the Scriblerians (Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Parnell) can be better understood through an attunement to their orientation towards the Longinian sublime and to the metamorphic poetics of Ovid. The project holds the negative and critical features of the group's writing in abeyance, as it attempts to account for the positive, phenomenological concepts and features of Scriblerian satiric and non-satiric writing. The intensities and affiliations of Scriblerian writing that emerge from this study gesture aesthetically and ethically beyond historical subjectivity to an opening to alterity and difference. This opening or hope for the achievement ethical dimension of writing is divulged as the intimate motivation of the literary or aesthetic components that accompany the negative, referential, and critical features of Scriblerian writing.

Examining closely the major writings of Pope and Swift in conjunction with the collaborative writings of the Scriblerus club, the project describes the concern with temporality that emerges from Longinian and Ovidan influence; the Scriblerian reflexivity that culminates in a highly virtual aesthetics; and the ethical elaboration of an orientation toward hospitality that emerges from this temporal and virtual aesthetic orientation. A "Scriblerian ethics" is an affinity for a hospitality not yet achieved in political, economic, and cultural life. Finally, the project analyzes throughout its readings of Scriblerian writing the violence that nevertheless accompanies Scriblerian aesthetics, examining the figures of modernity, criticism, and sexual violence (rape) that permeate Scriblerian texts as barriers or resistances to the achievement of an ethical orientation to alterity.

This study examines the representation of "conscience" in English literature, theology, and political theory from the late fourteenth century to the late seventeenth. In doing so it links up some prominent conceptual history of the term, from Aquinas to Hobbes, with its imaginative life in English narrative. In particular, beginning with William Langland's Piers Plowman and moving through texts in the "Piers Plowman tradition" and on to John Bunyan's allegories and polemics, I explore what I call the "satiric" dimensions of conscience in an allegorical tradition that spans a long and varied period of reform in England, medieval and early modern. As I argue, conscience in this tradition is linked up with the jolts of irony as with the solidarities of mutual recognition. Indeed, the ironies of conscience depend precisely on settled dispositions, shared practices, common moral sources and intellectual traditions, and relationships across time. As such, far from simply being a form of individualist self-assurance, conscience presupposes and advocates a social body, a vision of communal life. Accordingly, this study tracks continuities and transformations in the imagined communities in which the judgment that is conscience is articulated, and so too in the capacities of prominent medieval literary forms to go on speaking for others in the face of dramatic cultural upheaval.

After an introductory essay that examines the relationship between conscience, irony, and literary form, I set out in chapter one with a study of Langland's Piers Plowman (ca. 1388 in its final version), an ambitious, highly dialectical poem that gives a figure called Conscience a central role in its account of church and society in late medieval England. While Langland draws deeply on scholastic accounts of conscientia--an act of practical reason, as Aquinas says, that is binding as your best judgment and yet vexing in its capacity for error and need for formation in the virtues--he dramatizes error in terms of imagined practice, pressing the limits of theory. A long, recursive meditation on how one's socially embodied life constitutes distinctive forms of both blindness and vision, Langland's poem searches out the forms of recognition and mutuality that he takes a truth-seeking irony of conscience to require in his contemporary moment. My reading sets the figure of Conscience in Piers Plowman alongside the figure of Holy Church to explore some of these themes, and so also to address why the beginning of Langland's poem matters for its ending. In chapter two I turn to an anonymous early fifteenth-century poem of political complaint called Mum and the Sothsegger (ca. 1409) that was written in response to new legislation introducing capital punishment for heresy in England. In Mum I show how an early "Piers Plowman tradition" gets taken up into a rhetoric of royal counsel and so subtly, but decisively, revises aspects of Langland's political and ecclesial vision. In a final chapter moving across several of John Bunyan's works from the 1670s and 1680s, I show how Bunyan conceptualizes coercion in terms of the state and the market, and so defends a "liberty" of conscience that resists both Hobbesian assimilations of moral judgment to the legal structures of territorial sovereignty and an emergent market nominalism, in which exchange value trumps all moral reflection. In part two of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan draws surprisingly on medieval sources to display the forms of mutuality that he thinks are required to resist "consent" to such unjust forms of coercion.