Dustin Griffin

A model survey. Griffin writes very clearly, in a skimmable-but-interesting way; the book is very well organized, and full of information that you can either dig down into or skip over without losing much. His claim that satire can be best defined as an inquiry or provocation seems about right, and does a nice job of avoiding the insipidities of 'satire is moralization' as well as the stupidities of 'satire is a language game.' On the downside, it was published in 1994, and slips into period-pieceness at times: no literary work can be closed, it has to be open; irony has to be unstable; there can't be any straightforward relationships between anything, they must always be ambiguous or questionable or undermined by a reliance upon an other and other such nonsense.
Griffin makes the accurate point that theorists of satire have almost never been able to find satirical works that fulfill the criteria of their theories; and that, despite this, they write very good criticism of individual works. The same can be said for him: although he insists that satire is open/ambiguous/unstable and so on, when he actually discusses books or poems all of that goes out the window, and he makes you want to read the stuff.

The discussion of the 'conditions for satire' is very good, but leads to a very strange conclusion: that Byron was the "last great English satirist." This is the book's major limitation: Griffin discounts satire in the novel (hence Byron can be the '*last* great...'). Too bad; I'd like to know what he thought.… (meer)