Swift’s Solar Gourds and the Rhetoric of Projection

Scholars have long argued that the third book of Gulliver’s Travels satirizes specific scientific, financial, and political projects from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This essay contends that Swift’s representation of the Academy of Projectors also critiques the linguistic strategies of projection itself. Drawing upon an established literary tradition of anti-projection, Gulliver’s Travels pastiches popular conventions of proposal writing, including the comparison of a troubled present with better futures, the reconciliation of profit motives with a public good, and the transmutation of setbacks into solicitations for funding. In so doing, Swift demonstrates how even the most misguided ventures could be rendered attractive within their proposals. For Swift, a perennial opponent of English schemes for Irish improvement, project pastiche offered a mode of subversive mimicry revealing how the certitude of state planners derived from illusive rhetorical devices.