Menippean satire and the poetics of wit: Conventions of self-consciousness in Dunton and Sterne
The prose genre of Menippean satire attacks prevailing philosophical and literary decorum primarily through the ridicule of the philosophus gloriosus, or glorious philosopher. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wit's prominence in learned circles transforms the gloriosus into the&...
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| Format: | Dissertation |
| Language: | English |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
01-01-1992
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The prose genre of Menippean satire attacks prevailing philosophical and literary decorum primarily through the ridicule of the philosophus gloriosus, or glorious philosopher. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wit's prominence in learned circles transforms the gloriosus into the"learned wit." Ironically praising the "false" over the "true," the satirist uses wit to parody wit. Wit's wild lawlessness as a mental faculty, combined with its corresponding tendency to go beyond mimetic decorum as a rhetorical product, makes it an ideal weapon for satirists. Focussing on John Dunton's A Voyage Round the World (1691) and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), my argument demonstrates that Menippean satirists deliberately and self-consciously exploit wit to attack their intellectual targets. Indeed, where Dunton simply adapts the Baroque poetics of wit, inherited primarily from Thomas Hobbes, Sterne explicitly defends wit against John Locke and others by developing his own alternative poetics. Dunton and Sterne's learned wits Don John Kainophilus and Tristram Shandy dramatize the paradox that, despite their self-consciousness, they cannot fulfill the Delphic command of self-knowledge. My study distinguishes two kinds of wit which symbolize the absence of self-control resulting from the glorisus's failure to know himself: at the narrative level, Kainophilus loses control of his self-conscious, digressive wit; at the linguistic level, Tristram loses control of his anti-mimetic, metaphorical wit. Although self-conscious digression recurs throughout the Menippean genre, my first chapter concentrates on narrative digression, or "rambling" wit, in Dunton's narrator, Kainophilus. The following three chapters examine three aspects of Sterne's metaphorical wit. Chapter 2 examines Sterne's defence of false wit and his parody, not only of Locke (significantly, the philosopher of self-consciousness), but also of the creative process. Chapter 3 looks at Sterne's visual conceits, especially devices like the marbled page, which remind readers that they are reading a material text. The fourth chapter recovers Sterne's moral theory of wit, or festive wit, as a defence against self-deception. The self-referentiality and antimimetic nature of digressive and metaphorical wit illustrate the existence of narrative and linguistic metafictional techniques before the twentieth century. |
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| ISBN: | 0315730722 9780315730724 |