Swift and song

Jonathan Swift was surrounded by songs and singing. From his days as a student in Dublin in the 1680s to his death in the deanery in the Dublin liberties in 1745, street singing sounded in his ears. He was certainly aware of the power of song and wrote several poems, particularly political ones, that seem designed for singing. Yet he also wrote parodies of songs and was, famously, uninterested in music or secular singing—having a particular aversion to opera. This chapter looks at the text of some of Swift’s song-like poems and asks what their performance as songs might have meant to his contemporaries—and, indeed, to him.

Le langage universel de la publicité

Advertising seems to be the universal language of our age: its messages are understood by the recipient regardless of his mother tongue. The idea of an universal language is very old in European culture: Plato, Raymond Lulle, Athanasius Kircher, Leibniz, Descartes and Jonathan Swift explored this subject. Therefore, advertising, as a universal language, could seem to be the culmination of these multi-millennial efforts. However, this is not the case, because the universality of advertising is one-dimensional: its purpose is merely to make you buy. Therefore, advertising is only a partial solution to the problem of universal language.

The Voice of the Author in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

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.

Muravyov, V. (2020). Swift's way. Moscow: Rudomino. (In Russ.)

The book is a collection of two texts separately brought out half a century ago: one on Jonathan Swift (1968), the other on his famous novel Gulliver's Travels (1972). If on the first publication they attracted attention it was thanks both to the hero, presented as a satirist and political journalist, and the author Vladimir Muravyov (1939-2001), who enjoyed a reputation among Moscow intelligentsia as a dissident intellectual whose taste in poetry was appreciated by Anna Akhmatova. The texts in a new book are identical to those published in the Soviet time. Muravyov must have mastered stylistic inventiveness of his hero — to speak in a manner quite direct and at the same time elusive. He wanted to tell a life story of the writer whom he had chosen as one of his literary guides and whose lifelong battle on the side of the Reason must have looked too archaic, and therefore safe, to the Soviet censor but quite actual to the penetrating eyes of the audience.