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be pragmatically inexplicable because the context does not succeed in justifying their intrusion. The standard reaction to any instantiation of the symbolic mode is a sort of uneasiness felt by the reader when witnessing a sort of semantic waste, a surplus of possible and still imprecise significations conveyed by something thatin terms of conversational or narrative economyshould not be there. Well, every example of epiphany in the early works of Joyce, as well as the whole of Ulysses, are a seminal source for studying this type of textual strategy (see Eco 1962b, 1984:4.5). |
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There is an immense literature on Joyce's puns, and there is an immense literature on the semiotic revisitation of Rhetoric. In its Rhétorique générale (1970), Groupe µ has widened the field of rhetorical figures by distinguishing four types of operations which usually arise and work on both the level of expression (signifier) and that of content (signified) of the semiotic system, as well as on both lexical unities and synctatic chains. Therefore, such figures as alliteration, apocope, and metathesis are cases of metaplasm. Metaphors which act upon the content are metasememes: figures such as hypallage or hystheron proteron, which play on the syntactic structure of the expression, are metasyntagm, whereas a figure of thought, such as irony, is a metalogism. (See figure 9.1.) |
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All the puns of Finnegans Wake are metaplasm with a metasememic effect, where the structure of the linguistic expression is acted upon in order to produce alterations also at the level of content, similar to those which operate in metaphors. A metaphor substitutes one expression for another in order to produce an expansion (or a "condensation") of knowledge at the semantic level. The Joycean pun obtains analogous effects, but through two new procedures. On the one hand, it modifies the very structures of the expression: a pun such as scherzarade in fact |
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| unit | syntagm | content | metasemene | metalogism | expression | metaplasm | metasyntagm |
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