An Analysis Of Gulliver's Travels From The Perspective Of Defamiliarization

Jonathan Swift is the most prominent and controversial writer in the history of English literature.He makes a distinguished contribution to the development of literature at his time and his prose style is regarded as a literature model of the later writers.During his lifetime,Swift created many satires,political pamphlets and he also wrote some poems in his early days.Swift lives in a very complicated period when Europe is in the period of culture transformation and the political situation of England is changeable,too.Resonating with the complex era,Swift himself is also a very complicated entity.The most well-known work of Swift is his masterpiece Gulliver's Travels.Due to the interesting stories about the dwarfs and giants described in the first two parts of the book,this novel is often regarded as a children's book by many readers.There are also some scholars who observe the sharp irony of political corruption in this novel and consider it as a satire.However,the deep significance of Gulliver's Travels is far from a fairy tale or a satire.Since the publication of this novel,there is an immense number of studies about this book,but there is no consensus view regarding to the theme of the novel.This thesis bases on the theory of defamiliarization,mainly analyzes the defamiliarization of characters,language and narrative point of view,and aims to study the significance and purpose of the strategy of defamiliarization used by Swift in this novel.This thesis mainly consists of three parts.The introductory part includes a brief introduction of Swift,his “Gulliver's Travels”,literature review and the theoretical basis of defamiliarization.The second part is the body part,which is composed of three chapters: chapter one analyzes the defamiliarized characters in,the innuendo objects and the significance implied in those characters;chapter two analyzes the defamiliarization of language from the aspect of words and rhetorical figures in this novel,showing the special effect in reveling the corrupted and dark political system by virtue of the defamilarized language;chapter three focuses on the defamiliarized narrative strategy,and mostly explores the varied perspective of narration and the purpose of Swift in using the defamiliarized narrative point of view.The last part of the thesis is a conclusion: Gulliver's Travels is on the bases of the social reality of British society in the eighteenth century.Swift creates several strange countries,such as Lilliput,Brobdingnag,the Flying Island and the Houyhnhnms,and there is profound political criticism behind the ridicule text.The use of defamiliarization allows Swift to express his political view and thought more efficiently and profoundly.