Measure, Irony and Grotesque in Gulliver's Travels Postmodernity is obsessed with the eighteenth century. To exemplify how our nostalgia for that period manifests itself, Hans Kellner pointed out that a genre of novels and films set in the eighteenth century has exploded in popularity: Lempriere's Dictionary, The Perfume, "The Madness of King George III". We might also highlight the ongoing review of period scholarship, of which GEMCS itself is an example. In considering what generates this contemporary fascination, I have reflected on the aesthetic and political questions surrounding the beginnings, and perhaps even the end, of the bourgeois social sphere. A belief, most aggressively supported by Jean Baudrillard, is beginning to take hold: inside and outside the academy, that this field, after an almost all-encompassing expansion, is now in decline. Panic over social loss, sustainable or otherwise, offers a possible explanation for contemporary nostalgia for the period in which Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels. In this age of dissolution, what do we see when we look back to the age of our creation? One thing we observe is the development of a peculiar kind of irony that we cannot help but distinguish from our experience of this trope in the era of its dominance. The satirical effect of irony in Gulliver's Travels read by the Postmodern will be exactly what it was not at the time of its production. The historical distance between eighteenth-century and contemporary readers can be understood through Hayden White's use of major tropes in "Foucault Decoded." White assigns one major trope to each of the four archaeological periods described by Foucault in The Order of Things. In White's system, Foucault's Renaissance was metaphorical and located truth in similarity. Swift wrote in what Foucault considered the classical period, which, for White, had metonymy as the prevailing mode of reason, because a new transparency of representation made it possible to organize knowledge according to a standard and represent it symbolically on a table. The Modern era is characterized by synecdoche, as the subject of knowledge, Man, is now included in the study of the world, in a part-whole relationship. Finally, the Contemporary or Postmodern mode is ironic, characterized by a questioning of the foundations of knowledge and a Dionysian disappearance of the subject of that knowledge..