Further thoughts on irony

Last week an essay appeared on the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Brainstorm" blog, by Laurie Fendrich.
It was titled "Put Poor Students to Work," and I found myself thinking about what I'd just been talking about in trying to explain why Swift's irony in A Modest Proposal depended on assuming that his audience would find eating babies completely and unthinkably abhorrent, so abhorrent that they would know that the proposal was not a serious one. It's short, and worth reading as a modern parallel to Swift's irony. But what's perhaps most telling about it is to browse through the online comments, and realize that while Swift's audience would have been completely uniform in believing cannibalism to be unthinkable, Fendrich's audience is not nearly so unified.

As a way to continue this discussion, I'm going to hand out copies of the first section of "AN ARGUMENT To Prove, That the Abolishing of CHRISTIANITY in ENGLAND, May, as Things now stand, be attended with some Inconveniencies, and perhaps not produce those many Good Effects propos'd thereby." I've left some spaces in the pages for people to write in thoughts about the ways in which it seems to them Swift's irony is working.

Take a few minutes between now and Wednesday's class to read it, and write whatever you think appropriate in the empty spaces. If you'd like to read the rest of it, it's available on line, and in almost every anthology of eighteenth century literature and collection of Swift's writings you can find. We'll discuss it all on Wednesday, but I'd like to focus our discussion on that first few pages.

Sharing some answers

Everyone should have posted on the Swift Questions forum a report on a short investigation of a question about Swift and his work. Clearly, our immediate task is to see what we can learn by reading those reports, and to decide what else by the Dean we should read.

So let's begin by taking our class time today to read and discuss those reports. Between now and 4:00, read, and respond (other than evaluatively: as usual, ask questions, make connections, etc.) to, at least five of them. Of course, I expect everyone will want to read all of them, and you can continue to do so after that. You will be aware of the range of quality of the answers -- some have clear attributions of sources, some have almost nothing; some actually respond to the question, some don't. In some cases the author might well have found more that she doesn't report, and you might generate some more information by asking about it.

But then we also have to decide what other work by Swift some of us are going to read, and then what other work all of us should read. Here's how we'll do that. Having read the reports, everyone should decide what she'd like to read next, from the list below:

• The Battle of the Books (best online edition is by Jack Lynch)
• The "Bickerstaff Papers" (the best online edition is probably at Adelaide University).
• The Apology, The Dedication, The Bookseller to the Reader,  The Epistle Dedicatory, and The Preface to A Tale of a Tub (Online at Lehigh University)
• "A Digression Concerning the Original, The Use, and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth," from A Tale of a Tub
• A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (best online edition is by Jack Lynch)
• Three Sermons (Gutenberg is convenient)

Post your thoughtful descriptive reflection on your chosen text to the "Reading Swift" forum by Monday. Your reflection should be aimed at giving the rest of us as full a sense as you can of what sort of text it is -- how it sounds, what its arguments or assumptions are, etc. Be descriptive rather than evaluative: it's not important to this (however important it is to you) whether you enjoyed or were persuaded by the text: your job right now will be to tell the rest of us what it's like.