GRADUATE SEMINAR: FREAKING SWIFT AND FRANKLINEnglish 8450-001; CRN 35008; SAC 110; Thursday 7.30-9.30

Prof. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon Dept of English SAC 466; Phone/ Voice-mail 94655*

Office hours: TR 1.30-3.00; and by appointment.

Home Phone/ Voice-mail 215-238-1187

E-mail: Hugh.Ormsby-Lennon@villanova.edu (use this rather than Voicemail)

Home fax: 215-238-1187 (Alert me first, please.)

Home Page: url: http//www60.homepage.hugh.ormsby-lennon/ villanova.edu/ My home page is most easily accessible from “My Classroom,” a site that we all share for 84500-01. The home page is also accessible via the Villanova Faculty Directory on WWW. Please note that the home page contains many links (on alchemy, fools, Franklin, Quakerism etc) relevant to this class.

Class Description:

Jonathan Swift, Benjamin Franklin, and a congery of freaks may strike the normal student as odd bedfellows. In this class, we shall consider Swift and Franklin, two canonical authors of the eighteenth century, through the prism of “freakery” or “monster theory”—more formally, “teratology” and, increasingly, “disability studies”—which has become one of the most active sites in the burgeoning field of cultural studies.

Swift exhibited a life-long fascination with abnormal psychology and physiology, organizing his greatest satires around deviations from the norm. A devotee of carnival and fairground, Swift regularly visited freak-shows, puppet-shows, and raree-shows; he reveled in the lingo that enlivened them. As an old man, it was rumoured, he was himself exhibited as a freak by his servants in the Deanery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Franklin always amassed odd objects (an asbestos purse), curious observations (“Octuplets,” “A Sea Monster”), linguistic oddities (“The Drinker’s Dictionary,”) and weird phenomena (the Gulf Stream), but he was more interested in regularizing them and in harnessing language and the laws of nature for social and scientific progress. Franklin advocated the use of electricity as a lucrative parlor trick (which was freaky). And as an American diplomat in a debonair Paris, Franklin enjoyed exhibiting himself as the fur-hatted freak from the New World.

Swift and Franklin represent opposite ends of the spectrum of eighteenth-century thought. Swift was a conservative Anglican who believed in original sin, disdained the Irish, and held modern science and progress in contempt. Franklin was a free-thinking deist who advocated benevolence and achieved innumerable improvements both in Philadelphia and in the international market for meliorist projects. Yet each author had a flipside. We can recognize “another” Swift: a libertarian and an Irish patriot; a churchman whose career was derailed amidst accusations of atheism; and a hard-nosed neoclassicist with a paradoxical craving for popular culture (puppets, freaks, sex workers, pulp fiction, tabloid trash). Swift lived modestly within the means of his church income; he accepted payment only for Gulliver’s Travels. By contrast, Franklin became a wealthy man. In his best-selling Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733-1758)—initially modeled upon Swift’s debunking of London’s quack astrologers (April Fool’s Days, 1708-9)—Franklin assuaged the public’s desire for amusement and self-improvement. Franklin also harvested large profits from the contracts he had made as a printer and as a postmaster. If we can descry “another” Franklin—and Ben is less pathologically slippery than “Presto” Swift—it’s the skirt-chaser who preached good will, good works, and sexual restraint while lining his own pockets and having a good time. Swift described himself as an “hypocrite reversed,” a truth-telling bruiser; Franklin has never quite freed himself from the whiff of hypocrisy.

Freaks? From one perspective, this class comprises a traditional exploration of the works of two canonical writers. From another (and equally important) perspective, we shall deploy “freakery” in order to “interrogate” two writers who wrote on the edges of the English Empire. “Freaks” command as much interest today as they did during the eighteenth century—in recent years, there has been a spate of novels, movies, and TV shows spotlighting dwarfs, giants, conjoined twins, geeks, cyborgs etc—so freakery prompts questions that involve more than historical research and scholarly rumination. What makes “us” “normal”? Why do so many ordinary folks present themselves as freaks today, whether by volunteering for The Jerry Springer Show or by “bod-mod” (modifying their bodies)? Corollary questions: are great artists freaks? are their texts freakish? what makes us human? The final upshot of teratological investigation seems to be that Freaks R Us. Do you agree? (Consensus is not mandatory!) This class will give students an opportunity to study “freakery” in its myriad manifestations and applications.

Students are encouraged to watch television, cruise the web, browse along South Street, peruse the tabloids, and generally keep their eyes open so that they can contribute to the weekly “Freak Watch” that we shall be mounting in class. (Students from previous incarnations of this class are still mailing me “stuff.”)

Recurrent Themes: Many of these are currently “hot” in academic debate and in its province of “cultural studies”; some of them will be familiar to you, others not. Don’t rely upon me to point them out on a rote basis; find Waldo! The material turn (artifacts as texts). Cabinets of Curiosities. Libraries, Rare Book Rooms, and the History of the Book. Secret Societies. The Body. The Gaze. Madness and disability. The linguistic turn. Medical spectacles and semiotics. Carnival. Fairgrounds. Money and credit. Spiel and cant. Heteroglossia. Astrology. Alternative Medicine. Subalternity and coloniality. Popular culture and religion. Working-class literacy. Kleenex texts, reading, and circulation. (I could go on, but I shan’t. Tell me what I have omitted.)

Etymologies: Etymologies do not reveal how words are currently used, but they can often tell us how words attained their meanings. Etymologies do not, then, reveal the “true meaning” (etumos logos) of words. It is an enabling principle of modern linguistics that signification is an arbitrary function of synchronic systems—Ferdinand de Saussure’s l’arbitraire du singe—although post-modern philosophers are again doodling wildly with etymology. Whatever the current status of etymology, students are exhorted to download the entries for “freak,” “lusus naturae,” “monster,” and “monstrance” (including their cognates) from the Oxford English Dictionary Online which can be accessed from Falvey Library. Illustrative quotations from over the centuries show how subtle changes affect the meanings of these words between 1300 and the 1990s. Familiarity with and use of the OED comprises (as they say) a crucial “learning experience.”

First Class Trip: to be scheduled. I propose to lead a group to the Mutter Museum at the Philadelphia College of Physicians (the world’s leading collection of medical curiosities housed at 19 South Twenty Second Street, just south of Market). From thence we shall go to the Franklin House and Museum on Market between Third and Fourth (these contain a working facsimile of the printing press that Franklin used, a glass armonica, a Franklin stove among many exhibits). Thereafter we shall visit Christ Church, Philadelphia’s finest colonial church which just across the street (Franklin organized lotteries in order to raise money for the steeple). Thereafter we shall walk down, through streets well known to Ben, to enjoy a guided tour of St. Peter’s Church at Third and Pine. This is one of the best-preserved churches in America (bring your Hogarths to see why). In the churchyard, among other luminaries, is buried Charles Willson Peale, one of America’s firsts “monster-mongers” who ran his museum in Independence Hall for many years. Peale’s collection was purchased by P.T. Barnum. Depending upon your schedules, we can have dinner together on or near South Street. Freaky!

Future Trips will take us to the University of Pennsylvania’s Rare Book Room (turn a page in a First Folio: freaky), to the Library Company, and to the Philosophical Society (all of which institutions were founded by Ben). Please note that each of these trips will require elaborate preparations by highly skilled staff-members. Other ports of call will include (but are not limited to) Pennsylvania Hospital (whose foundation was supported by Ben) whose magnificent building houses an 1800 operating theater; the Eakins Gallery at Jefferson Hospital, and historic houses in Society Hill. At the edge of the map, alas, are Bartram’s House and the Wagner Institute. However we manage to schedule these trips, the last will end with dinner at a restaurant near our house (just off South Street) and coffee and cake thereafter.

Reading List

Swift

The Writings of Jonathan Swift, eds Greenberg and Piper (Norton: WJS)

Jonathan Swift, eds Ross and Woolley (Oxford: OA)

Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (Penguin: CP) To be discussed, alas.

Franklin

Autobiography, eds Lemay and Zall (Norton: Auto)

Writings, ed Lemay (Library of America: LA)

Other

William Hogarth, Engravings (Dover: Hogarth)

Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago)

(Franklin’s Autobiography is a masterpiece that can be hard to swallow whole, so I have, initially, crumbled it up into more assimilable readings for the syllabus. Students are also encouraged to download “First Aid on Franklin’s Autobiography” from my home page in which I provides both a guide to highlights and a summary (of sorts) that is keyed to Lemay and Zall’s Norton edition.)

Syllabus

Jan 27; Feb 3 Wine, Women, and Song

We shall examine how Swift undertakes a scatological examination of women (I) and how he praises one of the women whom he loved (II). We shall read Franklin in merry and scatological veins (the closest his writing comes to Swift’s (I). We shall see how Hogarth illustrated themes of sexuality and drunkenness as also addressed by Swift and Franklin.

I Swift, The Lady’s Dressing Room, A Beautiful Young Nymph, Strephon and Chloe, Cassinus and Peter, WJS, 535-550; CP, 448-456.

Franklin: LA: Drinker’s Dictionary, 266-71; On Drunkenness, 212-6; Old Mistresses, 302-3; Antediluvians, 303-4; Polly Baker, 305-308; To the Royal Academy, 952-955; Auto, 25-6, 36-38.

Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress, 18-23; A Midnight Modern Conversation, 25; Rake’s Progress, 29; Gin Street and Beer Lane, 75-76.

II Swift: CP: *Stella’s Birthday (1719), 187;**Stella’s Birthday (1721), 223-4; *To Stella on her Birthday, 241; Stella’s Birthday (1723), 256-8; *To Stella, 267-8; *Stella’s Birthday (1725), 286-7; **A Receipt to Restore Stella’s Health, 298-9; **Stella’s Birthday (1727), 313-5 [To Stella, Stella at Woodpark, 200-207, 260-262]; *Baucis and Philemon, 102-106; OA: **On the Death of Mrs Johnson,484-491; WJS, *Phillis, 520-2 [CP: To Stella, 200-7, To Stella at Woodpark, 260-2; WJS: Journal to Stella, 441-447; OA: Journals to Stella]

Franklin: **Auto (on Deborah Read), 20-22; 29; 31-2; 35-36; 55-56; 64-65; 181; LA, Matrimonial Happiness, 151-5, Country Joan, 293-4, [Celia Single, 188-190],

Hogarth: Before and After, 37-8; Industry and Idleness, 60-71

Students may be curious as to how Swift and Franklin began their careers as writers. Swift was a late bloomer; until he published his first masterpiece A Tale of a Tub in 1704 (when he was 37), he was almost unknown. Students may wish to peruse his early efforts in the genre of the “Pindaric Ode,” paying particular attention to his “Ode to the Athenian Society,” CP, 47-55; in the course of a life-time, this was one of only two works to which Swift attached his name. At the age of 12, Franklin first published some anonymous poems (“wretched stuff in the Grubstreet Ballad Style,” Autobiography, 10) and soon switched to prose (“Dogood Papers,” LA, 6-24) by the age of 16. Franklin never regarded poetry as a money-making venture, although he happily tossed off some light verse.

February 10 Servants, Chatter, Almanacs, and Popular Writing

Swift parodied almanacs which comprised the best-sellers of his and Franklin’s era. Taking his cue from Swift’s parody, Franklin produced colonial America’s best-selling real almanac. Both Swift and Franklin collected cliches. Swift turned them into a post-modern nightmare of meaninglessness; Franklin genially turned a buck as he buffed up proverbs for Poor Richard’s Almanac (but did he really believe in Poor Richard’s wisdom?). Swift and Franklin both employed servants, but their references to house-hold staff manifest Old and New World differences of emphasis. Note, too, authorial differences of emphasis upon the “thinginess” of things. Hogarth illuminates the credulity of the many gulls who consulted those “students in physic and astrology” who authored many of the era’s almanacs. Popcult will open other perspectives upon popular reading, particularly almanacs, during the period.

Swift: OA: Directions to Servants, 549-55; Compleat Collection, 563-602; WJS, A Tritical Essay, 422-6; Bickerstaff Papers, 426-441; The Progress of Beauty, 522-5; OA: Bickerstaff Papers, 193-217 (some overlap);

Franklin: LA: Poor Richard, 1185-1304 (esp. 1185, 1189-90, 1194-6, 1203-4, 1206-7, 1214-1216, 1221-2, 1224-6, 1248-51, 1278, *1294-1303; and relish as many of the proverbs as you can)

Hogarth: Hudibras Beats Sidrophel, 12; Rake’s Progress, 34; Marriage a la Mode, 53.

February 24 London, Writing, Freaks

March 3

Swift became notorious for A Tale of a Tub (1704; Fifth edition, 1710, with an Apology, footnotes, illustrations) which comprised three books, the Tale itself (and its goofy Digressions), The Battel of the Books, and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. This best-selling freak-text—a parody of a Grub Street “production” here penned by a deranged, impecunious, syphilitic author—functions as a shaggy-dog story, both narratively and conceptually. Swift (or, rather, his unnamed persona) attacks religion, politics, and philosophy as successful manifestations of madness that take their origins from physiological organs below the belt. Not only are all churchmen, statesmen, and philosophers—not to mention writers—governed by sexual or excretory impulses but they act as though they have escaped from madhouses and freak-shows. At their best, or worst, these people are successful mountebanks. The anonymous Tub helped ruin Swift’s career and garnered him the reputation of an atheist (not a good entry on the CV of a man who aspired to a bishopric). From another perspective, however, Swift can still be viewed as a good Anglican who mocks those who threaten the authority of the institution which he served loyally as a parson.

The Tub is wantonly allusive, evasive, and elusive—which can make its satire hard to follow—but it has exerted immense influence upon 18c novelists like Laurence Sterne and twentieth novelists like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (Swift’s fellow Dubliners) and Salman Rushdie. Swift’s contemporaries weren’t sure how to read the book—but they knew a freaky masterpiece when they saw one!—and you yourselves should laugh at the jokes when you can and should revel in its witty opacity when you can’t. Drawing not only upon Christian and Gnostic history but also joke guides to London, the carnival of Bartholomew Fair, and manifestations of religious enthusiasm, Swift parodies alamanacs and other popular literary forms, particularly in the “Digressions.” Note that Swift’s world-wide satire about “origins” segues suddenly and without warning into local jokes about the writers, publishers, and book-buyers of Grub Street.

Franklin never wrote a work so great as the Tub or Gulliver’s Travels but snippets of Swift’s tabloid trash surface (far more discreetly) in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. Indeed during his first trip to London (Autobiography, 33-40) Franklin moved in the same Grub Street milieu that Swift satirizes; he never met the Dean himself, but he drew, more circumspectly, upon Swift’s satiric strategies and voices (or personae) for his own writing. You will want to compare Swift’s “on-the-record” conservative statements about religion with Franklin’s free-thinking and deism—positions that Franklin first proclaimed, but later qualified—which were strains of libertine thought that Swift detested (or claimed to detest).

Swift: WJS, A Tale of a Tub (Digressions etc), 275-301, 311-317, 326-331, 336-341, 355-359, 369-371; WJS, Descriptions, 518-520, Progress of Poetry, 526-7 [also look at On Poetry, 567-78/ OA, 535-49]; CP, Tom Clinch, 316; Legion Club, 551-6.

Franklin: Auto: 32-39, 105-8 (projects in Philadelphia and London); LA, She-Wrestler, 151; Death of a Lion and a Burnt-Offering, 180; Sea-Monster, 262; Rattle-Snakes, 359-61; A Flexible Catheter, 446-7; the Arithmetical Curiosity, 448-51; the magical circle 451-53; Spouts and Whirlwinds, 454-466; Bifocals, 1104-10; an Instrument, 1116-8; Pleasant Dreams, 1118-22; Craven Street Gazette, 653-59; Infallible Method, 688-9

Hogarth: Southwark Fair, 27; The Distrest Poet, 41; Undertakers, 40; Four Times of Day, 42-45; The Reward of Cruelty, 80; Tyburn, 70.

March 10 Spring Vacation

17 Religion and Language

24 Easter Vacation

“Words are but wind,” declares the author of the Tub. Where does this leave the Logos or “the wind which bloweth where it listeth”? As a Christian priest, Swift was obsessed by transubstantiation, by the Spirit (slang, as in the Tub, for penis or for semen), and by lying (“the thing which is not”). As a can-do guy, Franklin lacked Swift’s obsessions but he had a sharp eye for the intersections of religion and language.

Swift: WJS, Tale of a Tub, 301-310, *318-26, 331-336, *340-55, 359-369; *Mechanical Operation, 397-414; Tatler, 448-452; Argument, 460-47; A Letter, 471-486

Franklin: LA, Dissertation, 51-71 (early heterodoxy influenced by Bernard Mandeville among other free-thinkers; did F forswear this, or did he merely conceal it?); Auto, 87-90; LA, 304-5, 308, 439-40, 1407-9 (all on Whitefield); LA, Backward Improvements + Jesus 1173-80

Hogarth: Hudibras, 5-16; Sleepy Congregation, 36; Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, 95 (Whitefield!)

Apr 7-May 3 Gulliver’s Travels, Franklin’s Autobiography; Subalternity

In the following weeks I propose to read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (which teems with freaks) and Franklin’s Autobiography fairly sequentially as we try to keep in mind all that we have read before. Is the “mechanically inclined” Franklin an unwitting parody of Gulliver (remarkably their families are buried in the same Oxfordshire churchyard!)? What does their shared empiricism and their enthusiasm for “projects” tell us about their attitudes to life? (Gulliver becomes a freak and a madman; Franklin becomes the most celebrated transatlantic figure of his time.) We may have time, perhaps outside class, to view portions of the Ted Danson/Mary Steenburgen TV miniseries (controversial among Swift scholars but, in my opinion, nicely-handled). Some compression of Travels and Autobiography may well be necessary to squeeze in Subalterns. Both Swift and Franklin were colonial writers and agitators living on the edges of the English empire. Swift had little lasting impact, other than symbolic, upon the fortunes of Ireland; Franklin, by contrast, played an important role in winning independence for America. April: please note that April 1 was Swift’s favorite festival.

Apr 7 Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

Apr 14 Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

Apr 21 Franklin: Autobiography

Apr 28 Franklin: Autobiography

May 5 Subalterns

Swift: CP, Holyhead, Ireland, 329-33; WJS, Wood’s Halfpence, 489-96; A Modest Proposal, 502-9; Verses on Death, 550-562; OA, 23 (old age envisioned young), Wood again, OA, 422-446, Petronius, 462-3.

Franklin: LA, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, 119-135, 1127, 1166-8; for more of Franklin’s attitudes to colonized peoples, see LA, “Index” under “Indians” and “Ireland.”

Legacies of Franklin: browse in the appendixes to the Autobiography for appraisals of Franklin, particularly by John Adams, Poe, Twain (very astute), Lawrence (why wasn’t Ben a Romantic?). By comparison with Franklin’s multiple projects (which included the Declaration of Independence and The American Constitution), Swift merely endowed a madhouse, St. Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin. Farewells.

Students may wish to contemplate the contrasting attitudes of Swift and Franklin to old age, death, and posterity.

FINAL ESSAY DUE. I shall discuss topics individually with each student. You may write research papers on thematic topics or you may conduct “close readings” of/comparisons between individual You may play musical chairs with Swift, Franklin, Hogarth, and freaks to any tune that you choose. I customarily receive essays of 15-20 pages or so. I care less about length (which can be stretched) than about quality (which is harder to fake). No plagiarism, please.

E-mail: Every student is required to activate her VU e-mail addresses and its forwarding capacity. Students are required to check their mail regularly. Important information about paper topics, class-discussion, and other important matters will be communicated by e-mail. (See also below: class communication.) I shall try to make this an e-class!

Academic Accommodations for Qualified Students with Disabilities. “It is the policy of Villanova University to make reasonable academic accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you are a person with a disability and wish to request accommodations to complete your course requirements, please make an appointment with the course professor as soon as possible to discuss the request. If you would like information on documentation requirements, contact the Office of Learning Support Services at 610-519-5636, or visit the office in Geraghty Hall.”