English 108    World Literature     Mr. Teich

DEFINITIONS OF SATIRE

From: Stan Freeberg (writer, composer/lyricist): "Without laughter, satire would be rage."

Adapted from: A Glossary’ of Literary Terms, (5th ed.), editor, M. H. Abrams

Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire "derides"; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt existing outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in "personal satire"), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even the whole human race (as in much of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, especially Book IV). The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however, is a sharp one only at its extremes. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is a comic creation, presented without derision for our enjoyment; the puritanical Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is for the most part comic but has aspects of satire directed against the type of the fatuous and hypocritical Puritan.

 

Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as a corrective of human vice and folly; Pope remarked that "those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous." Its frequent claim (not always borne out in the practice) has been to ridicule the failing rather than the individual, and to limit its ridicule to corrigible faults, excluding those for which a person is not responsible. As Swift said, speaking of himself in his ironic "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739):

Yet malice never was his aim;
He lashed the vice, but spared the name. .
His satire points at no defect,
But what all mortals may correct. .
He spared a hump, or crooked nose,
Whose owners set not up for beaux.

Satire occurs as an incidental element in many works whose overall mode is not satiric&endash;in a certain character, or situation, or interpolated passage of ironic commentary on some aspect of the human condition or of contemporary society.