The machine presented in the Academy of Lagado in the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels exemplifies the fantasy of collecting the entirety of all possible texts. The imaginary device foreshadows ...major questions raised by mathematics and probabilities as well as the recent progress made by natural language processing with automatic text and translation generators. These real machines, however, appear to dismantle the ideal of infinity which fiction portrayed. Swift’s satire disclosed, in the early 18th century, the danger induced by reasoning on infinity when dealing with finite numbers. Indeed, algorithms do not seem to create the infinity of possibilities which were envisioned, but tend, on the contrary, to unify speech. When machines leave the realm of fiction, the texts which they churn out no longer follow the principle of infinity but that of totality, in Emmanuel Lévinas’ sense of the word. The excerpt’s lack of popularity may thus be linked to the uneasiness it triggers when one is confronted to the new forms of humanism linked with the idea of artificial intelligence conveyed by the Silicon Valley.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, published in 1726, was analyzed from the viewpoint of scaling in comparative physiology. According to the original text, the foods of 1724 Lilliputians, tiny ...human creatures, are needed for Gulliver, but the author found that those of 42 Lilliputians and of 1/42 Brobdingnagians (gigantic human creatures) are enough to support the energy of Gulliver. The author further estimated their heartbeats, respiration rates, life spans and blood pressure. These calculations were made by the use of three equations, i.e., body mass index (BMI = W/H
) and quarter-power laws (E∝W
and T∝W
), where W, H, E, and T denote body weight, height, energy and time, respectively. Their blood pressures were estimated with reference to that of the giraffe and barosaurus, a long-neck dinosaur. Based on the above findings, the food requirement of Gulliver in the original text should be corrected after almost three centuries.
This book explores the impacts, particularly on their writing, of the serious illnesses of Swift and Pope, alongside their respective understandings of health issues and within their period context. ...Both Swift and Pope spent most of their lives suffering from serious illness, Ménière’s Disease (Swift) and Pott’s Disease (Pope). This was at a time when medical understanding of these conditions was minimal. This book examines the effects of illness on each writer’s relations with doctors, treatment, and medicine more widely, and how far and in what ways their own experiences affected their writing. The book explains the contemporary medical context and subsequent specialist knowledge of the illnesses, and places each alongside both writers’ attempts to come to terms with their suffering, not least with respect to the different forms and styles of their works. Each writer’s extensive correspondence is drawn on, as well as a range of texts.
This article discusses the various ways in which Platonic philosophy shapes Houyhnhnmland as described in Voyage IV of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. As a means to do so, it takes into ...consideration Plato’s Republic and his theories on the perfect state, as well as the Greek philosopher’s dialogue Phaedrus, which contains the Platonic theory of the tripartite human soul. The final claim of this article is that both the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos are “pure souls” made up of just one of the three soul components pointed out by Plato (namely, the appetites in the case of the Yahoos, and the rational part in that of the Houyhnhnms). In contrast with both, man constitutes an ambiguous and complex being with a multi-natured soul that shares features with the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms alike.
The vastly overscaled elements, lineaments and sculptures of a seemingly infinite house form the backdrop of Susanna Clarke's 2020 novel Piranesi. Head of Teaching and Learning at the Architectural ...Association, Mark Morris draws on his research into architectural models, paracosms and the representation of buildings in fiction, filtering this through the lens of an encyclopaedic knowledge of architectural history to investigate the book's narrative arc, its ghostly visitations and its beautiful if not overbearing architectural mise en scène.
This article investigates the layered nature of animality, maternity and abjection epitomised by Gulliver’s frightening adventures in Brobdingnag. I focus specifically on the maternal force‐feeding ...that Gulliver is subjected to by the Brobdingnagian monkey, which he describes as ‘the greatest Danger I ever faced in the Kingdom’. The monkey is killed following the episode, which temporarily restores Gulliver’s stalwart sense of self. I contend that the monkey incident in Brobdingnag decentres Gulliver’s sense of identity and demonstrates the violability of his body by the feminised animal, which ultimately destabilises his sense of masculinity and opens myriad queer potentialities.
Cruising Dystopia in Gulliver's Travels Coykendall, Abby
Journal for eighteenth-century studies,
September 2020, 2020-09-00, 20200901, Letnik:
43, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article places the curiously unqueer, because largely uncrip, reparative ethos of José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia in dialogue with the dystopian affect and aesthetic of Gulliver's Travels. ...To appreciate the queer dynamics of Swift's novel, we must adopt a suitably Swiftian stance: affirming the unbecoming, and decidedly crip, sensibility of the satire. Indeed, the novel's enablingly disabling ‘disability aesthetic’ helps controvert the continuing misimpression of queerness as perennially new: as at best materialised as fetish, a literally utopian ‘nowhere’ through which one may cruise, au flâneur, but never truly alight upon, muddy oneself within or, above all, linger in.
This article seeks to situate Jonathan Swift and his reception in the modern history of sexual norms. Through close attention to several moments across Swift's canon that touch on non‐normative ...sexuality, and to early intertexts that interpret those moments, including an unsolicited illustration by William Hogarth, I contend that Swift should be recognised – and was recognised by his initial readers – not only for testing the limits of sexual propriety but also for exposing, with characteristically devious subtlety, the contradictory and unpredictably destructive means by which sexual conduct began to be classified and regulated in post‐1688 Britain.
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