The politics & poetics of Gulliver’s travel writing

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dc.contributor.authorCox, Philip
dc.contributor.supervisorVahabzadeh, Peyman
dc.contributor.supervisorSayers, Jentery
dc.date.accessioned2019-09-03T23:15:44Z
dc.date.available2019-09-03T23:15:44Z
dc.date.copyright2019en_US
dc.date.issued2019-09-03
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Englishen_US
dc.degree.levelMaster of Arts M.A.en_US
dc.description.abstractWorking at the intersection of narrative studies and political theory, this thesis performs an original critical intervention in Gulliver’s Travels studies to establish the work as an intertextual response to the hegemonic articulations of European travel writing produced between the 15th and 18th centuries under the discourse of Discovery. My argument proceeds through two movements. First, an archeology of studies on Gulliver’s Travels that identifies key developments and points of significance in analyses of the satire’s intertextual relationship with travel writing. Second, a discursive analysis of the role of Discovery generally, and travel writing specifically, in constructing European hegemony within a newly global context. Together these movements allow me to locate Gulliver’s Travels firmly within the discourse of Discovery and to specify the politics of the text and the poetics of its operations. For this analysis I adopt a conceptualization of hegemony elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which defines discourse as a structured totality of elements of signification, wherein the meaning and identify of each element is constituted by articulatory practices competing to fix the differences and equivalences between it and others within the discourse. An hegemonic discourse is one that successfully limits the possibility of novel articulations according to a particular governing logic. In the Age of Discovery, this governing logic, I argue, is a socio-spatial logic that constructed the “European” subject through its difference from the “Non-European,” the “civilized” subject through its difference from the “savage,” and the “free land” of the “savage” peoples through its difference from the occupied lands of the “civilized.” To conduct the concomitant critical analysis of Gulliver’s Travels, I draw upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of the “distribution of the sensible,” which refers both to the partitions determined in sensory experience that anticipate the distributions of parts and wholes, the orders of visibility and invisibility, and the relationships of address or comportment beneath every community; and to the specific practices that partake of these distributions to establish the “common sense” about the objects that make up the common world, the ways in which it is organized, and the capacities of the people within it. This enables me to establish travel writing as an articulatory practice that utilized a narrative modality to “reveal” the globe in a Eurocentric image dependent upon the logic of Discovery: a discursively constructed paradigm that I identify as what others have labeled “travel realism,” which organized the globe into a single field of discursivity predicated upon the “civilizational” and “rational” superiority of Europeans over their non-European Others. Gulliver’s Travels, I conclude, intervenes in this distribution of the sensible by utilizing the satirical form as a recomposing logic to upend the paradigm of travel realism and break away from the “sense” that it makes of the bodies, beings, and lands it re-presents.en_US
dc.description.scholarlevelGraduateen_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1828/11112
dc.languageEnglisheng
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.subjectGulliver's Travelsen_US
dc.subjectJonathan Swiften_US
dc.subjectErnesto Laclauen_US
dc.subjectChantal Mouffeen_US
dc.subjectCarl Schmitten_US
dc.subjectJacques Rancièreen_US
dc.subjectRichard Hakluyten_US
dc.subjectSamuel Purchasen_US
dc.subjectMichel De Certeauen_US
dc.subjectBarbara Shapiroen_US
dc.subjectFelipe Fernández-Armestoen_US
dc.subjectStephen Greenblatten_US
dc.subjecthegemony and socialist strategyen_US
dc.subjectnomos of the earthen_US
dc.subjectdistribution of the sensibleen_US
dc.subjectpolitics of literatureen_US
dc.subjectdiscoveryen_US
dc.subjectdoctrine of discoveryen_US
dc.subjectinter caeteraen_US
dc.subjecttreaty of tordesillasen_US
dc.subjectinternational relationsen_US
dc.subjectpublic lawen_US
dc.subjectjus gentium europaeumen_US
dc.subjectjus publicumen_US
dc.subjectinternational lawen_US
dc.subjecttravel writingen_US
dc.subjecttravel realismen_US
dc.subjecteuropean historyen_US
dc.subjectatlantic explorationen_US
dc.subjecttravelen_US
dc.subjectgrand touren_US
dc.subjectexplorationen_US
dc.subjectdiscourse theoryen_US
dc.subjectearly modern perioden_US
dc.subjectmedievalen_US
dc.subjecthegemonyen_US
dc.subjectdiscourse of facten_US
dc.subjectpostcolonialismen_US
dc.subjectcolonialismen_US
dc.subjectpolitical theoryen_US
dc.subjectnarrative studiesen_US
dc.subjectliterary analysisen_US
dc.subjectmetaphoren_US
dc.subjectdiscursive analysisen_US
dc.titleThe politics & poetics of Gulliver’s travel writingen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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