The work is to be 6 pages with three to five sources, with in-text citations and a reference page. Their actions are based on the fundamental belief that modern thought is superior to ancient thinking.

Immanuel Kant, Francois-Marie Arouet, and Thomas Jefferson are some of the most popular thinkers of the Enlightenment. Yet, Voltaire, as Arouet is more popularly known, stands out among them because of his ability to utilize literary skills in presenting his philosophy. His most popular work, Candide, is a satire of the institutions and beliefs that dominate the 18th Century. Voltaire uses several techniques and styles in order to present, study, and criticize social maladies.

Candide is basically a satire but it can be more specifically called a Picaresque novel. As defined by Speake, picaresques are travel novels characterized by a loose plot that revolves around a hero (941). In the novel, the looseness of the plot is characterized by the wanderings of Candide, the hero, and the sudden emergence, disappearance, and reemergence of minor characters. Speake further characterizes the genre as violent, comic, and satirical. All these characterizations mentioned by Speake are used by Voltaire to reflect on the important themes during the Enlightenment. In the novel, readers can see the elements of violence in the execution of Pangloss and a military officer, and the murders committed by Candide. The comic, meanwhile, is more evident in the novel’s wordplays such as “metaphysical-theology-cosmology-geology” and Baron Thunder-ten-trench.

In the first wordplay, Voltaire mocks the complex scientific/philosophical fields of the 18th Century. He suggests that those fields have become so complicated that they have become nonsensical. The other wordplay is a pun on German names, those long, polysyllabic words that have queer combinations of vowels and consonants. It is a mockery of the pretentious nature of the nobles.&nbsp.

pur-new-sol

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