Saturday, September 15, 2007

Mordern Satire - From A Modest Proposal to Jon Stewart

A Modest Proposal was a very popular essay written by Jonathan Swift - author of Gulliver's Travels and probably one of the greatest satirist of the English language - to shock London society into thinking about the devastation that the English absentee landlords had brought to Ireland.
I first came across this in my Grade 12 English Lit class with Mrs. Cheung. And reading it again after almost 21 years I realize it has not lost its impact on me.
Where is satire and irony today? I would say the mantle has been passed from the print medium to TV. From Swift to Jon Stewart to Stephen Colbert...
So here is Swifts A Modest Proposal

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

1 Comments:

Blogger Blog reader said...

A Modest Proposal..
A brilliant satire! By employing satire the narrator implicitly describes the deplorable living conditions of the Irish peasents and also proposes a humble? solution to solve the problem. Throughout the story the narrator has maintained a deadpan stance that makes the reader feel there is a risk and is no joke which is pretty impressive..

7:46 PM  

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