Orgueil et démesure, ou la satire swiftienne

• Main Author: Nathalie Zimpfer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société d'Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 2014-12-01
• Series: XVII-XVIII
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/1718/407

As a critic recently pointed out, not only is satire “hard to pin down conceptually,” but the concept of “eighteenth‑century English satire” is a critical chimera (Marshall). This essay nevertheless suggests that the distinction between Horatian and Juvenalian satire, which partly has to do with the different ways in which both relate to measure, excess and hubris, remains valid and makes it possible to account for the specificity of Swiftian satire. The latter is Juvenalian in inspiration and, to a greater or lesser extent, always fiercely denounces the pride and hubris of the victims that it targets. But, paradoxical though it may sound, this saeva indignatio is subdued from an enunciative point of view : Swift indeed handles the dynamics of identification-differentiation that characterise satire with a strategy of enunciative disjunction whereby the hubris of his satiric victims is staged rather than actually described.