Menippean satire

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Menippean satire is a term broadly used to refer to prose satires that are rhapsodic in nature, combining many different targets of ridicule into a fragmented satiric narrative similar to a novel. The term is used by classical grammarians and by philologists mostly to refer to satires in prose (cf. the verse Satires of Juvenal and his imitators).

The form is named after the Greek cynic Menippus, whose works, now lost, influenced the works of Lucian and Marcus Terentius Varro; such satires are sometimes termed Varronian satire, although Varro's own 150 books of Menippean satires survive only through quotations. The genre continued with Seneca the Younger, whose Apocolocyntosis, or "Pumpkinification," is the only near-complete classical Menippean satire to survive. The Menippean tradition is later evident in of Petronius' Satyricon, especially in the banquet scene "Cena Trimalchionis," which combines epic, tragedy, and philosophy with verse and prose. In Apuleius' Golden Ass, the form is combined with the comic novel.

Menippean satire moves rapidly between styles and points of view. Such satires deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, or "humours", that they represent: the pedant, the braggart, the bigot, the miser, the quack, the seducer, etc. Critic Northrop Frye observed, "The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect" (1974, p. 309); he illustrated this distinction by positing Squire Western (from Tom Jones) as a character rooted in novelistic realism but the tutors Thwackum and Square as figures of Menippean satire.

Menippean satire plays a special role in Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin treats Menippean satire as one of the classical "serio-comic" genres, alongside Socratic dialogue and other forms that Bakhtin claims are united by a "carnival sense of the world," wherein "carnival is the past millennia's way of sensing the world as one great communal performance" and is "opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change." Authors of "Menippea" in Bakhtin's sense include Voltaire, Diderot and E.T.A. Hoffmann.[citation needed]

Contemporary scholars including Frye classify Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Thomas Carlysle's Sartor Resartus, François Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and O'Brien's The Third Policeman as Menippean satires.[citation needed]

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[edit] Bibliography

  • Relihan, Joel. 1993. Ancient Menippean Satire. Baltimore.
  • Kirk, Eugene P. Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism. New York: Garland, 1980.
  • Martin, Martial, "Préface" in Satyre Menippee de la Vertu du Catholicon d'Espagne et de la tenue des Estats de Paris, MARTIN Martial (édition critique de), Paris, H. Champion, 2007, "Textes de la Renaissance", n° 117, 944 p. ISBN : 9782745314840
  • Boudou, B., M. Driol, and P. Lambercy. "Carnaval et monde renverse." Etudes sur la Satyre Menippee. Ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Menager. Geneva: Droz, 1986. 105-118.
  • Vignes, Jean. "Culture et histoire dans la Satyre Menippee." Etudes sur la Satyre Mennippee. Ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Menager. Geneva: Droz, 1985. 151-99.
  • Kharpertian, Theodore D. A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson U P, 1990.
  • Kharpertian, Theodore D. "Of Models, Muddles, and Middles: Menippean Satire and Pynchon's V." Pynchon Notes 17.Fall (1985): 3-14.
  • Courtney, E. Parody and Literary Allusion in Menippean Satire. Philologus 106 (1962): 86-100.
  • Tristram Shandy, Digressions, and the Menippean Tradition. Scholia Satyrica 1.4 (1975): 3-16.
  • Wilson, Robert Rawdon and Edward Milowicki. ""Troilus and Cressida": Voices in The Darkness of Troy." Jonathan Hart, ed. ""Reading The Renaissance: Culture, Poetics, and Drama."" New York: Garland, 1996. 129-144, 234-240.
  • Milowicki, Edward J. and Robert Rawdon Wilson. "A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare." ""Poetics Today"" 23: 2 (Summer 2002). 291-326.
  • Payne, F. Anne. Chaucer and the Menippean Satire. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1981.
  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson. Minnesota U P 1984
  • Weinbrot, Howard D. Menippean Satire Reconsidered. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005.