The remarkable challenges Finnegans Wake offers to its readers and to the very process of reading are the results of an evolution of Nonsense literature. Despite the unduly "serious" framework of criticism which has been built up around it, Joyce's anomalous last work is a radical "hoax" upon interpretation. The regular confluences of linguistic deconstruction (via word association as well as recurring word and phrase matrices) and ontological metaphor, developed from authors such as Rabelais, Sterne, and Lewis Carroll, are offered by the Wake as tests to the reader's (qua reader) sensibilities. As Nonsense, Finnegans Wake departs from typified modernist modus operandi (metonymic allusion) and instead explores the limits of metaphor. The stakes of Joyce's hoax are of vital interest to the contemporary student of literature and culture, since the Wake dares the reader to find new meanings rather than to project old ones; to exult its eccentricities and its difference; and all the while to call into question (as the text itself does), its authenticity and authority.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.26682 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Conley, Tim. |
| Contributors | Cope, Karin (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001571179, proquestno: MQ29487, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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