FHS Paper 4 Critics

Warren Chernaik - the ruler ruled

‘the ruler ruled, the King the slave of his own desires, the bestial appetites overthrowing the rational faculty’

Warren Chernaik - Rochester thinks not ‘every man a king’ (Republican) but instead

‘all men are equally slaves’, Hobbesian

Warren Chernaik - Rochester equates the ‘blind battering ram of the penis’ to

the ‘insatiable demands of royal power, claiming sovereign sway over private property, freedom of conscience, law, public safety, even life itself’

Laura Brown - Behn naturalising the native ‘other’ as European

‘locus classicus of the trope of sentimental identification’

Achille Mbembe - slavery transforms the black person

‘transformed into the form and spirit of merchandise - the living crypt of capital’

Denis Donoghue - humans cannot see clearly

‘To be human is to err. To see is to misconstrue.’

Denish Donoghue - Swift inspired by telescopes and microscopes in Molyneux

‘he did not need to go far to be stimulated by exercises in the nature of perspective’

Denish Donoghue - disproportion vs proportion

‘‘once the disproportion is established, any instance of proportion becomes comic.’

Denis Donoghue - eye dazzled

‘the eye is liable to be dazzled by surfaces and appearances’

Denis Donoghue - controlling the eye

‘it must be controlled by evidence from the inner eye, the philosophic eye which sees things truly’

Denis Donoghue - Swift’s method of discovering truth

‘whatever in human experience survives the strain of several persepctives is likely to be true’

Douglas Lane Patey - epistemic commitments of travel form

‘travel can serve as a metaphor for fundamental principles of how the mind operates and how education proceeds’

Douglas Lane Patey - travel form arriving at human nature

‘Gulliver uses the epistemic procedures of the travel form to explore human nature itself, to abstract away accidentals until we have a view of the essential.’

Paul J Hunter - order of events (big and small)

‘the abrupt reversal undoes the reader as well as Gulliver, so that our humiliating smallness seems smaller still.’

Paul J. Hunter - parodying travel narratives

‘the voyages do not involve learning or improvement or progress in the teleological way implied by travel narratives and the travel motif itself’

Paul J. Hunter - formal parody of novels

‘the episodic structure and lack of narrative development, the gross exaggeration of subjectivity’

Paul J. Hunter - Gulliver the anti-novel

‘emphatic anti-novelistic statement’

Kathleen Williams - Laputians eyes are symbolic of

‘willful abandoning of the physical and of the vital for the abstract, the mechanical, and the unproductive’

Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet - the eighteenth century

‘the first period in modern history to face the problem of what it means to come immediately after a great creative achievement’

Christopher Ricks - Dryden as a critic

‘markedly the critic who conceives of poetic creation and influence as paternal’

Christopher Ricks - Dryden’s allusion

‘not parasitic or servile, it is allusive, and the allusions derive their geniture from the very nature of allusion, its sense of the paternal and filial.’

Charles Durham - Satan hypocrisy

he ‘clearly depends upon hierarchical rank for his authority’

Charles Durham - Abdiel can go against hierarchy

without fear of reprisal or punishment so long as the lesser being is in accord with the commands of God’

Charles Durham - message of Abdiel

‘hierarchical rank can be superseded by merit’