Joyces mistakes : problems of intention, irony, and interpretation / Tim Conley.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Joyces Mistakes, Tim Conley explores the question of what constitutes an 'error' in a work of art. Using the works of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as central exploratory fields, Conley argues that an 'aesthetic of error' permeates Joyce's literary productions.

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CHOICE Review

Like Sebastian Knowles's outstanding The Dublin Helix: The Life of Language in Joyce's Ulysses (CH, Oct'01), Conley's book investigates errors, puzzles, mistakes, and simple and complex problems of all kinds in Joyce's writings. Is an ordinary and common misprint on the page the result of a printer's slipup, or is it actually a cosmic extension of its own possibility that a conniving text would like to offer as a viable alternative to itself? If one agrees that Bloom, rather than Joyce, believes erroneously that black refracts rather than absorbs sunlight, what does that say about the nature of the characters and the fictional reality they think they live in? But this is not as much fun as it might be, since Conley does not get into very many of Joyce's specific conundrums, instead preferring to talk about error in theory and in general. Can Ulysses's concluding dates and places even be considered errors? "This isn't 1904, says the Ulysses postmark, this is just a story pretending it is 1904.... The postmarks ... are erroneous too: it isn't 1922, and this certainly isn't Trieste." I think we might have figured that out for ourselves. For specialists in the indeterminate. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Comprehensive graduate and research collections. M. H. Begnal Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus