Article Title
Abstract
By applying James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to Kenneth Burke’s dramatic pentad, I argue that Joyce’s lexical ambiguities, while intentionally caustic, succeed in strengthening rather than discarding typical dramatic structures. Renowned for its perplexities, the Wake revels in its flexible allusions and word play. These “puns and reedles,” as Joyce calls them, serve to distort what readers would generally classify as elements of narrative form, summed up succinctly by Burke’s dramatic pentad: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Nevertheless, I attempt to prove that Joyce’s work emerges rhetorically sound through his authorial motives, motives which expand the terms of Burke’s pentad beyond their supposed boundaries.
Recommended Citation
Chamberlin, London
(2014)
"Creating a Lexical Universe: Redefining Burke’s Dramatic Pentad through the Language of Finnegans Wake,"
Papers & Publications: Interdisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 3
, Article 3.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/papersandpubs/vol3/iss1/3
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other English Language and Literature Commons, Other Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric Commons
