"Great anarch's ancient reign restor'd:" Menippean satire and the politics of knowledge in the British Enlightenment.
Item
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Title
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"Great anarch's ancient reign restor'd:" Menippean satire and the politics of knowledge in the British Enlightenment.
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Identifier
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AAI3310643
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identifier
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3310643
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Creator
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Williams, Matthew.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David H. Richter
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Philosophy
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Abstract
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At the heart of critical controversies over Menippean satire and the application of the label to the major satires of the early eighteenth century, especially those of Jonathan Swift, is the radical disjunction between claims of its subversive tendencies and the deeply entrenched conservatism of its producers. This paradox is resolved when it is recognized that although Menippean satire takes a deeply skeptical, even nihilistic, attitude toward knowledge, its epistemological uncertainty ultimately makes necessary custom and tradition. These satires challenge the emerging ideologies of market capitalism, bourgeois aesthetics, secularism, and materialist science---the modernity disparagingly portrayed in A Tale of a Tub as universal madness. Yet at the same time, these satires push in extreme directions, undermining a great deal of received knowledge, and challenging, as do other discourses of the period, superstition, scholasticism, dogmatism, and zealotry. As such, they are not merely reactionary texts, but are also instrumental in the intellectual developments of the broader Enlightenment.;Chapter one defines Menippean satire as an ironic, fictional elaboration of systems of thought within a parodic, mixed-genre form that questions systems of knowledge by drawing attention to the discursive nature of ideas. Chapter two reorients discussions of Menippean satire toward the epistemological crisis that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is its immediate context. I associate many of the rhetorical strategies of Menippean satire with Pyrrhonism, a radical skepticism that, although destructive of dogmatic and received knowledge, finally makes necessary some form of faith, even if only in habit and common life. Chapter three deviates from other recent monographs on Menippean satire by situating the form within the class antagonisms of the period, insisting that Menippean satire must be historicized. Chapter four argues that Gulliver's Travels and Blazing World, both fantastic, parodic discovery narratives, delimit a geography of knowledge by which the true and the false, the human and the monstrous, may be mapped out. Chapter five charts a new route from scandal fiction to the novel, arguing that Delarivier Manley's self-proclaimed Varronian satire is a central and transitional text in the development of novelistic fiction out of Menippean satire.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
