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ENGL W3950x Satire and Sensibility 4 pts.

(Seminar). Seminar. British verse, novels, and critical prose from early and mid-18th century, with a view to the satirical and the sentimental as related and complementary dispositions, variously nuanced in the elicitation of scorn and pathos, but reflecting in the main a tragicomic outlook of literary consequence. Our reading, then, of poetry and fiction diversely savage, good-natured, hilarious, and exquisite in derision of vice and folly, shall inquire into the gamut of satiric modalities, from invective to irony, which, bristling at the social frontiers of liberty and faith, ambition and learning, commerce and luxury, sex and marriage, wit and imagination, also targets, and often with charming self-deprecation, the literary disposition itself. In that vein we shall examine aesthetic, religious, and philosophical perspectives that came to bear in the satirist's skillful tacking of blame and praise; likewise, we shall examine stylistic and formal innovations that emerged in adaptations of classical and biblical models to contemporary circumstances. Further, we shall observe, in some novels, an aspect of the satirical and the sentimental combined, which obtains not only in the rhetorical artistry and excess of characters' speeches, but in the way that lyric is incorporated into the fiction, and where characters themselves compose, recite, or criticize poetry. Critical and philosophical writings of the period include, among others, essays by Dryden, Shaftesbury, and Addison. Verse genres include ode, epistle, georgic, elegy, hybrids and mock emulations: Finch, Swift, Pope, Gay, Montagu, Gray, Goldsmith, and others. Our novels and fictional prose include Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Johnson's Rasselas, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

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