Bodily Consumption

8/6/2019 Bodily Consumption

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BODILY CONSUMPTION IN J.SWIFTS A MODEST PROPOSAL

Coordinator: Student:Asist. univ. dr. Mihaela Culea Rebegea Cristina


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PLAN

Argument

The concept ofbodily consumption

A Modest Proposal a brief presentation

Consumptive fiction = imperialistic society

Satire and irony; the allegorical level ofinterpretation

The process of dehumanization

Double-sided irony

Conclusions

Bibliography


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Argument

the idea of body and the exploitation of the

human body, allegorically shaped into a

discourse of consumption, so as to reflect therealities of eighteenth-century enlightened

England.


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The concept of bodily

consumption the human body :

may be defined as the complete materialstructure or physical form of a human being oranimal;

the human body embodies , in fact, theentire society;

to consume:eat or drink something; use something

up; destroy something or somebody;

it actually infers the act of exploitation.


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A Modest Proposal forPreventing the Children of PoorPeople from Being a Burthen to

their Parents, or the Country,

and for Making them Beneficialto the Publick.


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Consumptive fiction =

imperialistic societyimperialistic issues: the plantation project

- the exploitation practiced on Irish people is a

problematic issue that has a long history;- overpopulated, deprived of rights and

employment, the Irish collapsed into a state ofpoverty and exploitation, allegorically seen as

a state of consumption.


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consumptive fiction achieved by means ofthe metaphor of cannibalism:

- in his consumptive fiction, Swift employs themetaphor of cannibalism in order to represent animperialistic society that exploits the physicalbody;

- the excessively-pragmatic society reduces thebody to an economic commodity;

- Swift metamorphoses the subject of exploitationinto a discourse of cannibalism .


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Satire and irony; the

allegorical level ofinterpretation irony the use of words to express something

other than and especially the opposite of the

literal meaning; satire a literary work holding up human vices

and follies to ridicule or scorn;

allegory a work in which the characters andevents are to be understood as representingother things and symbolically expressing adeeper, often spiritual, moral, or politicalmeaning.


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author proposer;

according to Wayne Booth, irony does not

just rely on shared social values; it relies onliterary value;

by destroying the moral and religious systemof values, it draws attention to the problem of

self-degradation.


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The process of

dehumanization the analogy man animal:

- in sustaining his argument for cannibalism, Swift

places a sign of equality between man andanimal, so as to justify the act of eating, butmost of all it highlights the state ofdehumanization in which people have fallen.


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a vocabulary of depersonalization:- a newborn child described as just drooped

from its dam (A M. P., line 20);- women seen as breeders (A M. P., line 32);- human beings reduced to statistical

entities: the two hundred thousand couplewhose wives are breeders (A M. P., line 32), out ofwhich only an hundred and twenty thousandchildren of poor parents (A M. P., lines 37-38) willbe annually born so as to humbly offer topublick consideration (A M. P., line 59).


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Double-sided irony

man animal:- irony strikes back to such an extent that it seems

animals do not deserve to be compared to men;

- the analogy appears to be unjustified, sinceSwifts discourse reveals animals as being morehuman-like than people themselves;

man as object devoid of life:

- in the end, we can see that people can no longerbe compared to animals, so low is their level ofdegradation that they come to be reduced tomere objects of consumption.


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Conclusions

what society does is to commodify people,

to dehumanize them under the pressure of

imposed soc

io-econom

ic and pol

iticalrealities;

Swiftswriting acts as a mirroring device,

and by means of bodily consumption he

emphasizes the practice of exploitationuponwhich the English imperialistic societymaintained its consumptive growth.


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Bibliography

1. Swift, Jonathan, A Modest Proposal, available on http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html;

2. Black, Jeremy, Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. A Subject for Taste, HambledonContinuum, New York, 2007.

3. Colebrook, Claire, Irony, Routledge, London, 2004.

4. Dargie, Edward,A History of Britain, Arcturus, London, 2007.

5.Houlihan, Flynn, Carol, The Body in Swift and Defoe, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1990.

6. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire?show=0&t=1305834810

7.http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?lextype=3&search=allegory

8.http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?lextype=3&s

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