TIME AND SPACE IN THE TECHNIQUES OF SATIRE

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the level of consciousness of time and space in three technical devices commonly used by satirists: the voyage to other worlds, allusions, and digression. In discussing these techniques, I have chosen three different satires by three different writers: Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Pope's Dunciad and Byron's Don Juan. In each chapter of this study, I not only link time and space with the technical devices under consideration, but suggest how the analysis of time and/or space works in conjunction with each writer's satiric goals. Moreover, I suggest how each of these techniques expresses the particular writer's epistemological assumptions of reality. While technique is stressed, the thematic is not lost, for I do address certain themes which are present in all three works. While, to my knowledge, no extensive work has been done on time and space in the techniques of satire, I have not been forced to wander, as Wordsworth said of Newton, "through strange seas of thought, alone." For, in preparation of this thesis, I have read and felt the benefit of Locke's and Berkeley's philosophies of time and space, general studies on the satire genre, and wide selections of the most recent criticism of each author under consideration. It might be noted at once that the concept of the chronotope, as outlined by Bakhtin is his Dialogic Imagination, also relates time and space to literary mimesis, but Bakhtin’s methodology is quite different from that attempted in this thesis. The approach I have taken for each chapter is, I hope, eclectic, relating the aesthetic, the philosophical and the historical, while always illustrating my ideas from examples from the primary texts.