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.
Infrastructuralism denotes an emerging field of critical inquiry dedicated to understanding the facilities, equipment, and personnel that deliver civilization's most basic amenities, including water, light, heat, waste disposal, and transportation. How did writers portray infrastructure before it became a word and concept? In his 1716 mock-georgic poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay depicted one element of eighteenth-century society's built underpinnings, the street, as an assemblage of decaying but reparable matter, a site for disparately institutionalized forms of labor, and an array of moral and navigational possibilities called ways. Listening to Trivia's representation of road making can yield both an early modern idea of the city as object of upkeep and a historicized poetics of infrastructure able to make meaning of civic enterprise present and past.
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