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Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire
Andrew Robinson celebrates the high notes in the mathematician's inimitable musical oeuvre.
Journal Article
Jonathan Swift’s Conceptualization of Reason and its Representation in Gulliver’s Travels
Borrowing from Gordon Mckenzie’s argument for a twofold structure — intuitive and discursive — in Swift’s conceptualization of human reason, this article conducts a philosophical reading of Gulliver’s Travels. In the book, intuitive reason and discursive reason are embodied in the Houyhnhnms and the Laputian philosophers respectively, through whose interaction with Gulliver are revealed the nature, workings and features of these two parts of human rational faculty. The article concludes with an account for Swift’s definition of man as animal rationis capax rather than animal rationale in the design of the Travels, and an emphasis on the historical nature of his conceptualization of reason.
Journal Article
The Wanderer as Becoming: A Satirical Critique of Indian Philosophy and Religions and a Wanderer’s Religion
Rahul Sankrityayan, a twentieth-century Indian polymath, is known for his contributions to Buddhism, Marxism, and Hindi literature. While his writing has been analyzed for its engagement with Buddhism and Tibet, he is also credited with inaugurating Hindi travel-writing. Though his contributions to this genre are well-recognized, one crucial work—ghummakaṛa śāstra (1945; lit. The Treatise of a Wanderer)—has received insufficient scholarly attention. This article investigates the intersection of religion, travel-writing, and satire in two chapters of Sankrityayan’s treatise: athāto ghummakaṛa jijñāsā (lit. Thus, the Curiosity of a Wanderer) and dharma aur ghummakaṛī (lit. Religion and Wandering). It argues that Sankrityayan employs the figure of the Wanderer to critique religions, religious ideals, and religious figures in two key ways. First, by framing his work as a śāstra (treatise) in the classical sense, he appropriates authoritative discourse to contest religious ideas. Second, the Wanderer functions as a transcendental subject who pervades history. Blending satire with polemic, the text subverts traditional religious hermeneutics. Through close analysis, this paper demonstrates how Sankrityayan’s unconventional form—a dialogic interplay between treatise and satire—invites readers to interrogate religious authority, offering a model for engaging with religion beyond doctrinal frameworks.
Journal Article
Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire
Andrew Robinson celebrates the high notes in the mathematician’s inimitable musical oeuvre.
Andrew Robinson celebrates the high notes in the mathematician’s inimitable musical oeuvre.
Political satirist and musician Tom Lehrer performing at the Hungry i in June 1965.
Journal Article
Jonathan Swift and the Nature of Modern Violence
Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels have been read as participating in a wider debate, the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, and as critiques of the rise of the New Sciences and the study of the \"Book of Nature.\" The essay argues that Swift viewed the Modern preoccupation with nature as emblematic of the desire to return to a pre-cultural state of chaos and violence. Far from being an attempt to step into nature as a way of arriving at empirical truth, thus, these works hint at Swift's notion that the Modern return to nature represented dissolution of human culture. In addition, the essay discusses the afterlife of Swift's notions of the Modern as inherently anti-cultural through the work of Great War poet David Jones and his postwar masterpiece In Parenthesis.
Journal Article
An Essay concerning the Origine of Sciences and the Mode of Scriblerian Satire
A short satire, An Essay of the Learned Martinus Scriblerus concerning the Origine of Sciences, concerns the alleged role of an anthropoid race of pygmies in the evolution of human knowledge. It was first published in the Miscellanies of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift in 1732, and has been attributed to both of these authors. The aim of this article is to provide the first full account of the Essay in its context. This draws on information relating to the literary, biographical, and bibliographical circumstances in which members of the Scriblerian group produced the work. Among issues considered are relevant controversies engaged in by fellows of the Royal Society, notably Dr. John Woodward; the debt of the Essay to a pioneering work of physical anthropology, Edward Tyson’s Orang-Outang (1699), first explored by Richard Nash; and a survey of other sources, as revealed by citations and hidden allusions. The concluding argument seeks to establish the close filiation of the Essay with other Scriblerian satires and to suggest that it serves as a template for the subgenre that these came to embody. A case is made for the key role in composition taken along with Pope by Dr. John Arbuthnot, FRS, a polymath with special interests in comparative anatomy.
Journal Article
Exhausting His Whole Stock of Inspiration: Christopher Anstey's The New Bath Guide and the \Thorny Road\ of Satire
Careful observers of the literary scene in the second half of the eighteenth century were struck by the sudden success and subsequent decline of Christopher Anstey. While The New Bath Guide would continue to garner both praise and imitators, the author himself appeared to have lost either his touch or his nerve, or perhaps both. Here, Regan argues that Anstey's own querulousness about his perceived situation as a satirist would be central to the authorial troubles he experienced as he continued to publish even after the initial printing of The New Bath Guide.
Journal Article
Early Condensations of Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was allegedly very popular immediately following its publication in 1726. But the high price at which it was sold, 8s. 6d., made the book prohibitively expensive for book-buyers, as evidenced by several cheaper abridgments and condensations of Gulliver’s Travels that appeared soon after the book’s publication. Many readers likely encountered Gulliver’s Travels through these condensed texts instead of through the full version. These condensations differ substantially from the original, especially in their treatment of the caustically misanthropic voyage to Houyhnhnmland. The version of Swift that many readers encountered is a gentler, milder satirist than the Swift we are familiar with from the full text.
Journal Article