scholarly journals A Broader Relevance of Gullivers Suffering in the Context of Culture Shock

Author(s):  
Atteq-ur- Rahman ◽  
Nadia Gul ◽  
Riaz Hussain

Purpose: This study analyzes Gulliver’s sufferings among his different hosts and his relevancy to today’s sojourners who travel abroad and suffer from the effects of culture shock. During his stay with four different hosts, Gulliver remains unable to adjust with them due to the impact of culture shock. He looks at his hosts from the cultural parameters of his native land that leads to multiplication his problems. Like him, most of the travelers who move abroad for various reasons undergo the effects of culture shock. If they fail to understand the internal and external aspects their hosts’ culture, they may respond as Gulliver does. Approach: Though critics have analyzed Gulliver’s character from different perspectives, none has studied him from the lens of culture shock. On close analysis of the text of Gulliver’s Travels, readers can easily observe Gulliver suffering from the effects of culture shock among his hosts. A fresh perspective has been adopted in this study by analyzing Gulliver’s character in the light of culture shock. Culture shock affects sojourners in multiple ways. Many students, migrants, and the diaspora go through this experience while living in a new culture among new people. Findings: This study shows that culture has been a common phenomenon for people who stay abroad for long or settle though they do not realize that several problems that they face are caused by culture shock. However, if someone consciously assimilates the effects of culture shock, it becomes a great experience to live a better life. Implications: Though Gulliver belongs to the eighteenth century England, yet he exists around and among us.  It is Gulliver’s relevancy that adds to the meaningfulness of his character for the contemporary sojourners. 

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-348
Author(s):  
Atteq ur Rahman ◽  
Sayed Zahid Ali Shah ◽  
Shakeel Khan

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has been one of the most fascinating works of English literature. It is its suggestive quality due to which it has been read in a variety of different perspectives. Twentieth century critics have read it in the light of different psychoanalytical approaches. This study focuses on an entirely different aspect i.e reverse culture shock. It analyzes the effects of reverse culture shock on Gulliver’s behavior and his interaction with his family through a close reading of the text of Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver who suffers from an obvious identity crisis fails to cope with the readjustment problems at home after living among different hosts. After every subsequent re-entry, Gulliver’s behavior especially with his family members deteriorates. The imprints of his last hosts remain so deeply engraved on his mind that fails to live peacefully with his family members and has to live in isolation. This is where we can relate Gulliver to people who after living abroad fail to adjust with the people of their native society and family members.   


Dialogos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 38/2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBU Valentina

Gulliver’s Travels was first published in 1726 and several reprints, each with minor changes in text, were issued within a few years’ time, with the 1735 edition being generally regarded as the more authentic version. Since then, the popularity of the book has never ceased to increase. Swift was as hostile as Pope and the other founders of the Scriblerus Club to the regime of his time and the Hanoverian court and this attitude is reflected in various ways throughout the book, but Gulliver’s Travels suggests that we should look further than the confines of the eighteenth-century world. This paper explores the author’s voice in the narrative in order to look closely at the impact of Swift’s ideas on the reader. The attempt to identify several roles of the author suggests that the reader is perplexed by the narrator’s attitude and challenged to reformulate the entire perspective on the human race. The article, therefore, surveys the book by looking at different authorial voices used by Swift as a technical device to communicate his radical critique of human nature.


Author(s):  
Mark Burden

Much eighteenth-century Dissenting educational activity was built on an older tradition of Puritan endeavour. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the godly had seen education as an important tool in spreading their ideas but, in the aftermath of the Restoration, had found themselves increasingly excluded from universities and schools. Consequently, Dissenters began to develop their own higher educational institutions (in the shape of Dissenting academies) and also began to set up their own schools. While the enforcement of some of the legal restrictions that made it difficult for Dissenting institutions diminished across the eighteenth century, the restrictions did not disappear entirely. While there has been considerable focus on Dissenting academies and their contribution to debates about doctrinal orthodoxy, the impact of Dissenting schools was also considerable.


Author(s):  
Robert H. Ellison

Prompted by the convulsions of the late eighteenth century and inspired by the expansion of evangelicalism across the North Atlantic world, Protestant Dissenters from the 1790s eagerly subscribed to a millennial vision of a world transformed through missionary activism and religious revival. Voluntary societies proliferated in the early nineteenth century to spread the gospel and transform society at home and overseas. In doing so, they engaged many thousands of converts who felt the call to share their experience of personal conversion with others. Though social respectability and business methods became a notable feature of Victorian Nonconformity, the religious populism of the earlier period did not disappear and religious revival remained a key component of Dissenting experience. The impact of this revitalization was mixed. On the one hand, growth was not sustained in the long term and, to some extent, involvement in interdenominational activity undermined denominational identity; on the other hand, Nonconformists gained a social and political prominence they had not enjoyed since the middle of the seventeenth century and their efforts laid the basis for the twentieth-century explosion of evangelicalism in Africa, Asia, and South America.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
AVI LIFSCHITZ

Abstract Frederick II's writings have conventionally been viewed either as political tools or as means of public self-fashioning – part of his campaign to raise the status of Prussia from middling principality to great power. This article, by contrast, argues that Frederick's works must also be taken seriously on their own terms, and interpreted against the background of Enlightenment philosophy. Frederick's notions of kingship and state service were not governed mostly by a principle of pure morality or ‘humanitarianism’, as argued influentially by Friedrich Meinecke. On the contrary, the king's views were part and parcel of an eighteenth-century vision of modern kingship in commercial society, based on the benign pursuit of self-love and luxury. A close analysis of Frederick's writings demonstrates that authorial labour was integral to his political agency, publicly placing constraints on what could be perceived as legitimate conduct, rather than mere intellectual window-dressing or an Enlightened pastime in irresolvable tension with his politics.


1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kraus

In ancient Greece the priests of Apollo asserted that freedom of movement was one of the essentials of human freedom. Many hundreds of years later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Atlantic world again talked of emigration as one of man's natural rights. It was in northern and western Europe that easier mobility was first achieved within the various states. The next step was to use that mobility to leap local boundaries to reach the lands across the western sea. From the “unsettlement of Europe” (Lewis Mumford's phrase) came the settlement of America.Americans and those who wished to become Americans felt at home in the geographical realm conceived by Oscar Wilde. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” he said, “is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” It was the belief that Utopias were being realized in America that caused millions to leave Europe for homes overseas.IA Scottish observer, Alexander Irvine, inquiring into the causes and effects of emigration from his native land (1802), remarked that there were “few emigrations from despotic countries,” as “their inhabitants bore their chains in tranquility”; “despotism has made them afraid to think.” Nevertheless, though proud of the freedom his countrymen enjoyed, Irvine was critical of their irrational expectations in setting forth to America. There were few individuals or none in the Highlands, he said, “who have not some expectation of being some time great or affluent.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristopher Kyle ◽  
Scott A. Crossley ◽  
YouJin Kim

This study evaluates the impact of writing proficiency on native language identification (NLI), a topic that has important implications for the generalizability of NLI models and detection-based arguments for cross-linguistic influence (Jarvis 2010, 2012; CLI). The study uses multinomial logistic regression to classify the first language (L1) group membership of essays at two proficiency levels based on systematic lexical and phrasal choices made by members of five L1 groups. The results indicate that lower proficiency essays are significantly easier to classify than higher proficiency essays, suggesting that lower proficiency writers make lexical and phrasal choices that are more similar to other lower proficiency writers that share an L1 than higher proficiency writers that share an L1. A close analysis of the findings also indicates that the relationship between NLI accuracy and proficiency differed across L1 groups.


Pen, print and communication in the eighteenth century is a volume of fourteen essays each of which explores the production, distribution and consumption of both private and public texts during the Enlightenment from a variety of historical, theoretical and critical perspectives.  During the eighteenth century there was a growing interest in recording, listing and documenting the world, whether for personal interest and private consumption, or general record and the greater good. Such documentation was done through both the written and printed word. Each genre had its own material conventions and spawned industries which supported these practices. This volume considers writing and printing in parallel: it highlights the intersections between the two methods of communication; discusses the medium and materiality of the message; considers how writing and printing were deployed in the construction of personal and cultural identities; and explores the different dimensions surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of private and public letters, words and texts during the eighteenth-century. In combination the chapters in this volume consider how the processes of both writing and printing contributed to the creation of cultural identity and taste, assisted in the spread of knowledge and furthered bother personal, political, economic, social and cultural change in Britain and the wider-world. This volume provides and original narrative on the nature of communication and brings a fresh perspective on printing history, print culture and the literate society of the Enlightenment.


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