Saturday, July 29, 2017

Can someone help with an essay response to "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift?

“A Modest Proposal” is satirical essay by Jonathan Swift, which he originally published anonymously in 1729. Swift, who also wrote Gulliver’s Travels, was himself Irish. The essay responds through satire to popular discourses lamenting the widespread poverty in Ireland, subjects about which Swift had previously written serious pieces.
The straightforward brutality of the proposal (eat babies to eliminate poverty) no doubt accounts for the staying power of this essay.
For a response essay, there are multiple trajectories that might be effective. One would be to take the essay literally and take apart the supposedly factual bases that the author presents to back up their argument. Spurious statistics are deployed in support of the author's multi-faceted propositions, and the figures themselves and the possible benefits of the programs could be attacked.
Another approach would be to compare the subject and/or approach of Swift’s satire to a contemporary social problem in the United States or elsewhere. You could then match that “problem” by exaggerating actual proposals you have read about. One topic could relate to food, such as suggesting alternative food choices to solve hunger problems, as Swift has done—perhaps the squirrels or pigeons that populate cites? Another approach would deal with poverty more generally; you might propose some exaggerated form of workfare that would require people to do extremely undesirable jobs for any type of compensation, and you could address how effective this would be against poverty.

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