From Moby-Dick to Finnegans Wake: Essays in Close Reading- Edited by Janusz Semrau

This volume is a posthumous revised edition of selected papers by Andrzej Kopcewicz on classic works of American and Irish fiction, published originally between 1979 and 2005. The book opens with two introductory sketches: a semi-theoretical one on intertextuality and a semi-historical one on the interaction of high and low literary forms. The gist of the book are textual analyses of the intricacies and reciprocities of some of the best-known works by Herman Melville, Frank R. Stockton, Henry Adams, Thomas Pynchon, Gilbert Sorrentino, Donald Barthelme, Paul Auster, Flann O'Brien, and James Joyce. While the essays lend themselves to being read in any order, as well as in isolation, the underlying Peircean-Joycean premise of the book is a semiotic-mythical commodius vicus of palimpsestic recirculation. Informed by a combination of poetic sensibility and disciplined as well as erudite mind, the ten essays collected here demonstrate that the agenda and methods of the more traditional close reading and the more contemporary intertextuality are not exclusive of each other.