Reading "Rotennness": Jonathan Swift and Textual Error

ABSTRACT: This essay argues that textual error is central to Jonathan Swift's satirical and epistemological strategies in A Tale of a Tub . Attending to both obvious typographical mistakes and less perceptible "clean errors," the essay demonstrates how Swift stages corruption as inherent to modern print culture, and, in doing so, invites readers to engage critically with imperfection. Rather than presenting error as an obstacle to understanding, Swift mobilizes it as a means of testing interpretive agility. Drawing on early editions, errata lists, and the history of eighteenth-century print correction, this essay explores how Swift's satire depends on readers' ability to navigate corrupted texts. In its final section, the essay turns to machine reading with tools such as optical character recognition (OCR) transcriptions and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to show how Swift's concerns resonate with contemporary text technologies. Machine-generated errors reveal the ongoing entanglement of meaning and mistake. By tracing critical and technological dimensions of textual corruption, the essay offers a new framework for understanding Swift's satire.