Claude Rawson: An Overview and Appreciation, and Other Observations

This essay offers an account of the range of Claude Rawson’s work
as a literary scholar, critic, editor and reviewer. It considers Rawson’s particular
importance for the study of Jonathan Swift, for our understanding of Swift’s irony
and satire, and the recognition of Swift’s achievement and influence as a poet.
Drawing upon Rawson’s insights into the character of Swift’s satire, and particularly
of its proleptic Tuality, the essay observes Swift’s satiric anticipation of Artificial
Intelligence and of the ³Death of the Author.´ The essay reports Swift’s significance
for the American confessional poet Delmore Schwart], indicates a polemical
ancestry for Swift’s favourite trope of the satirist with a whip, and suggests an
unnoticed contemporary model for the ³Language Machine´ in Part III of Gulliver’s
Travels.