Comparative Essay between James Joyce and Jonathan Swift

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast between James Joyce's “The Dead” and Jonathan Swift' “The Modest Proposal”. This paper enlightens and explores several perspectives that pertain to these two masterpieces by James Joyce and Jonathan Swift; in addition, the paper incorporates the theme of fiction to compare and analyze between “The Modest Proposal” and “The Dead”. The Dead is one of the exceptional literary works that Joyce presented to the world. This masterpiece was a significant contributor to fame and success of Joyce. In at least two of his short stories, Joyce intensifies and extends this disparity. Through it all, he sees “nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by his imagination”. By merging two disparate patterns of imagery, Joyce further intensifies this same disillusionment and loss of self in “The Dead.” One set, those images of Gabriel's wife Gretta, are a complex version of the boy's image of the girl in “Araby”; the other those images of snow in the story. Each should be examined separately before seeing how they merge.

The Modest Proposal has always struck readers as perhaps the perfect work of its kind. By silently allowing this character to reveal himself, Swift invites the reader to feel the horror of close contact with the type of the detested "projector," who is made to speak the "reasonable," "modest," and fraudulently compassionate language of real eighteenth century projectors and planners. Thus, the perfection of the work, according to some critics, may be attributed to the convincing completeness of the impersonation. A Modest Proposal is ostensibly the work of a ``projector'' a private citizen who proposes sweeping schemes for public benefit. Like Swift's most famous persona, Dr. Lemuel Joyce of Joyce's Travels, the projector is a materialist, a man of modern science.

Discussion

Fiction has been written in the twentieth century by subtly refining the advances made by others. Joyce's strict narrative focus in such a story as "The Sisters" (1904), for instance, used by Henry James in What Maisie Knew (1897); his use of free indirect discourse, suggested by Gustave Flaubert's style indirect libre employed so successfully in Madame Bovary (1856-1857). In Joyce's hands, however, such techniques became seamless, almost invisible parts of the narrative structure. This could at times seem awkward in other writers makes itself known in Joyce's texts only after repeated careful readings (Tilton, 73).

James Augustus Alyosius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Rathgar, a modest borough of Dublin, Ireland. James Joyce was to live at the college, except during holidays, until June 1891. By the end, of the 1890-1891 school years; however, his father's mounting financial difficulties dictated that he would be withdrawn from the college. Swift continued his studies at Trinity College toward the M.A. degree until 1689, when he left Ireland, along with many other Protestants, to escape an uncertain political situation, as William III and Mary replaced James II in England, and as Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, tried to advance the ...