The role of thunder in Finnegans wake / Eric McLuhan.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The study establishes the nature and aims of Finnegans Wake as Menippean satire and interprets the Wake in that light. McLuhan examines Joyce's use of language, and in particular his use of ten hundred-lettered words (thunderclaps).

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CHOICE Review

McLuhan advances with remarkable clarity his analysis of the ten thunder words in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. In perceptive introductory essays, the words are segmented in morphemes and syllables. These lists and their introductions, however, are not exhaustive; according to the foreknowledge of the reader, dhu, for example, should evoke Roderick Dhu. McLuhan advances his analysis on the basis of Menippism, which defies logical progression and attempts to provoke or shock the reader into new awarenesses--but exactly what awareness is not generally apparent. The weakness of McLuhan's Menippean approach is that, like Bricolage and "stolentelling," it covers historic ignorance. A cloudy segment is dismissed as "Menippean" with studied absence of the "new historians" of recent criticism to decipher difficulties. Marshall McLuhan influences the analysis of social progression from tribe to city, from primitivism to electricity, of which the best analysis of thunder words occurs with the ninth word and its engine for car or airplane. The women of the Wake are subsumed under PQ for Prankquean. Highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate libraries. G. Eckley emeritus, Drake University