“Jonathan Swift and the Arts of Dislocation”

The essay discusses Jonathan Swift’s controversial position within the canon of English literature calling attention to his textual and paratextual strategies of satiric and parodic dislocation as ambitious mythmaker, occasional agitateur and popular, indeed, sensational writer against the dominant view of Swift as the censorious and conservative Augustan spokesman. Following the suggestions of Ann Kelly’s recent study devoted to Swift’s artful construction of his own provocative print identity but especially taking into account Said’s seminal insights into his work as uneasy intellectual, the article focuses on the restless discontinuity which characterizes Swift’s writings from the very beginning of his lifelong ‘Battle between Ancients and Moderns’ in order to address his own problematic dislocation of cultural spaces and temporal/canonic preservation as well as his powerful interrogation of the unbearable costs of modernity.