Jonathan Swift 作品의 諷刺性 硏究 = (A) Study on the Satire in Jonathan Swift's Works

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This thesis is to study the leading characteristics of Jonathan Swift's satire through his principal works, Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, Modest Proposal, and Drupier's Letters, chiefly focusing on his attitude towards satiric writings, his motives for satire, style of his satirical prose and its techniques, and various objects of his satire.
In the preface, chapter one, a brief survey of the purpose, scope andmethodology .of this study is mentioned with the writer's introduction of previous studies on Swift's satire.
In chapter two, Swift's attitude towards satire and his motives for it are examined. Satirists are usually divided into two categories: a pessimist or misanthrope, who believes that life is contemptible and that vice and folly are rooted in man's nature; and an optimist, who believes that vice and folly can be cured. Many critics placed Swift in the former category, that is, a misanthrope, but there are a number of ,evidences in his works to prove that he was among those who thought that wickedness or absurdity could be cured. Although he used to attack some of his friends who he thought had done him disservice, Swift was on the whole deeply concerned for the welfare of friends. The deaths of his mother, Anne Long, Stella, Gay, and Arbuthnot and the like left their mark upon him, and his personal writings reveal genuine sorrow for them. Many a Swift's letter also belies the contention that he was a heartless misanthropist and his life shows him as a man who was ready to correct others' errors and so sympathetic as to help friends in distress. One of his charitable acts was that he left money to endow a mental hospital. The gist of this study with these under consideration is that the writer has found out that Swift began to write his satirical works partly to correct what he saw as evil in man and society.
In this chapter Swift's motives for satire are also examined. Motives of a writer for satire are generally as complex as emotions he wishes to evoke and as various as forms of his writings. For instance, satirists' motivations are generally sprung out of their intention to correct immorality or folly, to criticize a sense of superiority or falsehood in the objects of satire, out of their desire to create a nobler kind of beauty in the literary situation and out of their ambition to pursue a utopia which cannot be found in a real society. This study confirms that though Swift's satirical motives were rooted in his individual revenge and ambition, most of them stemmed in part from his indignation along with sympathy for the Irish common people in difficulties.
Chapter three is an examination of various techniques Swift used in his satire. He heightened the effect of his satire through irony, parody, and a careful use of specific image patterns, asserting that a satirist should confine his attacks to faults which a person could correct and that he should not mention the names of his literary enemies, lest their memories of his attacks on them be perpetuated.
Swift avoided direct expressions of attack in his satire and utilized a persona to convey his feelings, or at least to help a reader infer what those feelingsmight be. This indirect method contains the use of parody and deliberate exaggeration. By metaphors which Swift often employed he made his satirical writings more effective.
Style is considered to have played an important role in the techniques of Swift's satire. Since the aim of a satirist is partly to communicate his thoughts to readers and do it effectively, part of the art of a satirist should be that of a rhetorician. Few would disagree with the assertion that Swift was a master of rhetorical skills. Critics have repeatedly praised him for the clarity of his prose style. Doctor Johnson, who had little sympathy for Swift, pointed to the simplicity of his language. Swift had good commands of creative sentences with careful choice of words, vivid free from the old patterns, and making use of humorous episodes, he used to evoke a laugh. By the device of reclassification he picked out an object or group of his satire out of the undesirable social class and reduced it to much the lower class or level to make readers distrust a snobbish affectation or intellectual fame of his satirical objects. Besides these techniques, Swift maximized his writings of satire by the use of irony, animal imagery, the examination of which is not made in this study.
Chapter fww is an examination of the objects of his satire. Here they are divided into three categories. In the first group are some policies of the the English government related to economical problems of Ireland and some renowned political figures. The second category is about abuses of religion. The Protestant dissenters were his favorite targets and he regarded them as a major threat to the Church of England. Catholics and Anglicans, however, who abused their religion also became the targets of his satire. And then there are attacks on some pedantic writers or authors who abused prefatory material, digressions in contemporary publications, and devices of indexes and abstracts, which Swift considered to be pedantic nonsense. Along with literary critics, science and philosophy were the objects of his satire, for he saw experiments on science as aimless and impractical. The object of the third category is man himself. Compared with other fields of his satire, his attacks on man in general have a small portion and are more concerned with attributes of man, that is, reason, hypocracy, snobbishness, pride, and so on, than with professionals. Swift's satirical attitude towards all the above-mentioned objects was cold and acrid with coherence without a trace of mildness.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• 목차
• Ⅰ. 序論 = 1
• 1. 硏究의 目的 = 1
• 2. 旣存硏究의 檢討 = 2
• 3. 硏究의 方法 및 範圍 = 4
• Ⅱ. 諷刺觀 및 諷刺動機 = 6
• 1. 悲觀的 人間觀 = 7
• 2. 樂觀的 人間觀 = 10
• 3. 諷刺動機 = 15
• Ⅲ. 文體 및 技巧 = 25
• 1. 文體 (Style) = 25
• 2. 修辭的 技巧 = 33
• 가. persona 기교 = 33
• 나. parody 기교 = 36
• 다. metaphor 기교 = 41
• 라. nasty image 기교 = 47
• 마. 積立(accumulation) 및 具體化기교 = 50
• Ⅳ. 諷刺의 對象 = 54
• 1. 社會에 대한 諷刺 = 55
• 2. 宗敎 및 學問에 대한 諷刺 = 60
• 3. 人間에 대한 諷刺 = 68
• Ⅴ. 結論 = 74
• BIBLIOGRAPHY = 78
• Summary = 83