双语有声阅读：讽刺文学

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The Satiric¹ Literature

 

Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness,its originality² of perspective.Satire³ rarely offers original ideas.Instead, it presents the familiar in a new form. Satirists do not offer the world new philosophies.What they do is to look at familiar conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful, or affected⁴. Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization⁵ that many of the values we unquestioningly accept are false. Don Quixote derides⁶ the stupidity of knights⁷ Brave New World ridicules⁸ the pretensions⁹ of science; A Modest Proposal dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism¹⁰. None of these ideas is original. Chivalry¹¹ was suspect before Cervantes, humanists objected to the claims of pure science before Aldous Huxley, and people were aware of famine before Swift. It was not the originality of the idea that made these satires¹² popular. It was the manner of expression, the satiric method that made them interesting and entertaining. Satires are read because they are aesthetically¹³ satisfying works of art, not because they are morally wholesome¹⁴ or ethically¹⁵ instructive.They are stimulating¹⁶ and refreshing¹⁷ because with commonsense¹⁸ briskness¹⁹ they brush away illusions and secondhand opinions.With spontaneous irreverence,satire rearranges perspectives,scrambles familiar objects into incongruous juxtaposition²⁰, and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude²¹.

 

Satire exists because there is need for it. It has lived because readers appreciate a refreshing stimulus²², an irreverent reminder²³ that they live in a world of platitudinous²⁴ thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy.Satire serves to prod²⁵ people into an awareness²⁶ of truth, though rarely to any action on behalf of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear, and read in popular media is sanctimonious²⁷, sentimental²⁸, and only partially²⁹ true. Life resembles in only a slight degree the popular image of it. Soldiers rarely hold the ideals that movies attribute to them, nor do ordinary citizens devote their lives to unselfish service of humanity.Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when they do not hear them expressed. 

 

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