Passage B
Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness, its originality
of perspective. Satire 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 look at familiar
conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful or
affected. Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization that
many of the values we unquestioningly accept are false. Don Quixote makes chivalry
seem absurd. Brave New World ridicules the pretensions of science. A Modest Proposal
dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism. None of these ideas is original.
Chivalry was suspected 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 satires popular. It was the manner of
expression the satiric method that made them interesting and entertaining Satires are
read because they are aesthetically satisfying works of art, not because they are morally
wholesome or ethically instructive. They are stimulating and refreshing because with
commonsense briskness they brush away illusions and secondhand opinions. With
spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects into
incongruous juxtaposition and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude.
Satire exists because there is a need for it. It has lived because readers appreciate a
refreshing stimulus, an irreverent reminder that they lived in a world of platitudinous
thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy. Satire serves to prod people into an
awareness of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear, and
read in popular media is sanctimonious, sentimental, and only partially 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 community. Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when
they do not hear them expressed.
【題組】46. What does this passage mainly discuss? .
(A) Reasons for the popularity of satire
(B) Popular topics of satire
(C) New philosophies emerging from satiric literature
(D) Difficulties of writing satiric literature
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