Художественные произведения о Джонатане Свифте

• Дом, который построил Свифт — телевизионный художественный фильм 1982 года режиссёра Марка Захарова по одноимённой пьесе Григория Горина.

• Владимир Карев. На секретной службе Джонатана Свифта

 

(киносценарий, 1989).

3. Look at the list of Swift’s works and match the titles in Column A with the genre in Column B:

Column A	Column B
a) The Battle of the Books, 1697
b) A Tale of a Tub, 1704	a) a novel
c) Argument against Abolishing
Christianity, 1711
d) The Conduct of the Allies, 1711	b) a poem
e) Journal to Stella, 1710-1713
f) Proposal for the Universal Use
of Irish Manufacture, 1720
g) Drapier’s Letters, 1724	c) an essay
h) Cadenus and Vanessa, 1726
i) Gulliver’s Travels, 1726
j) A Modest Proposal for preventing
the Children of Poor People from	d) a pamphlet
Being Burthen to their Parents
or the Country, 1729
k) On Poetry: a Rhapsody, 1733
1) Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, 1739

1. Explain how the circumstances of his life influenced the problematics of his writing.

2. Explain Swift’s literary phenomenon. What qualities of his writing account for his enormous influence on the development of European literatures?

3. Find out which of Swift’s works have been translated into Russian and Belarusan. When were the first translations made?

4. Find at least five critical works dealing with Swift’s work and write an annotation to each of them.

Text discussion - Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

1. Explain why Swift combines an adventure story, satire and fairy­tale in the novel.

2. Show how Swift’s novel may be read as a response to “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, How can you account for the difference in the writers’ approach to human nature and civilization?

3. Comment on the links between J. Swift’s novel and “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by F. Rabelais and “Robinson Crusoe” by D. Defoe.

4. Comment on the structure of the novel and its genre. How many books does “Gulliver’s Travels” consist of?

5. Say how Swift helps us to accept the reality of the Lilliputians. How does he make the size of the Lilliputians clear?

6. Compare the familiar elements Gulliver finds in Lilliputian society with the new things he is amazed at. What things does he find ridiculous?

7. Analyze chapters 4 and 6 and explain specific examples of satire in Book I. What conditions in the England of Swift’s time are satirized in the book? What is Gulliver’s attitude to the Lilliputians?

8. Comment on the jargon of official language at court and the ambiguity of wording of laws. What is Swift’s message here?

9. Explain why Gulliver is a giant in Lilliput and a lilliput in Brobdingnag. What does the King’s questioning of Gulliver bring out about life in England?

10. How do you understand the contrast between the things satirized and the methods used in Books I and II? Are Swift’s descriptions fundamental to his aims? Analyze Chapter 6 and explain the King’s comment about the English.

11. Explain how the structure of Book III differs from that of the other two books. Show how the objects of satire shift in Book III.

12. Show how Gulliver’s position in society changes in comparison with Books I and II.

13. Discuss the methods of education described in Book III. What subjects are prioritized?

14. Explain why Gulliver admires the Houyhnhnms so much. Why does Swift choose horses as the ideal animal? Why are the Yahoos so despicable? Why does Gulliver begin to feel inferior? Show how Gulliver’s attitude to humankind evolves in the course of the novel.

15. Prove that Swift’s framework for this book is really effective.

5. Problem discussion

1. What is the theme of Swift’s novel? Why does Swift finish the novel with Gulliver’s Voyage to Houyhnhnms (he wrote this book prior to “A Voyage to Laputa” but then re-arranged the order in which the books appeared in the printed version)?

2. What is the writer’s opinion of humankind? Is he a misanthropist?

3. What is Swift’s view of the ideal society? To what extent does the land of the Houyhnhnms represent this ideal? What about

Brobdingnag? What are the virtues, weaknesses and .vices of the Brobdingnagians?

4. What are the particular objects of Swift’s ridicule? Why is Swift’s satire so bitter?

5. What are Swift’s methods of satire?

6. How does Swift convince the readership of the “reality” of Gulliver’s adventures?

7. What does the book suggest to us about 20^ll,-century life?

8. In what different ways can we read “Gulliver’s Travels”?

9. Compare the complete version of the novel with the children’s edition. Are there any differences? If yes, how can you account for them? Is “Gulliver’s Travels” a book for children?

10. Find arguments for or against the following quotations:

1. “Gulliver, apart from being a good story, is the indictment of the human race for refusing reason and benevolence as the ways of life. <...> [Swift’s] prose is clear, but it is clarity sustained by the most vigorous mind of the century. It defies imitation. Never is the meaning obscure, and each argument is developed with a deadly certainty, not through rhetoric, but by putting the proper words in the proper places.”

{Ifor Evans. A Short History of English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958. P. 207-208).

2. “Throughout the book, Gulliver doggedly preaches the glories of European ‘civilization’ (that is, customs an ] beliefs of the Age of the Enlightenment), and arouses only derision or disgust.”

{Kenneth McLeish. Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide. London:

Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd, 1989. P. 232)

3. “There is a debate about whether the Travels counts as an early novel, or not. It is safest to label it a philosophical romance, largely because there is little structural unity, and no identification with a central character.”

{Ian Ousby. The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. P. 393)