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Jack Weaver explains all of Joyce's writing in terms of music and evaluates the music -- its form, kind, and technique -- in each work. Using Joyce's own rhetoric of theme and variation, Weaver moves from one character to another, through the poems, fiction, and drama, noting improvisations and finding intricate musical patterns throughout the canon.

As Joyce's work grows in philosophical complexity, Weaver says, its music becomes more recognizable. In Chamber Music and part of Dubliners, Joyce at first merely mentions musical titles, instruments, and forms. In other stories in Dubliners, he alludes to them. His writing in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins to approximate musical techniques, and music reflects and dominates its story and characters. By the time of Finnegans Wake, it replaces both. Within the works, Weaver cites examples of musical augmentation, diminution, harmony, counterpoint, and key signatures, showing how the works become more experimental and increasingly dissonant in the manner of avantgarde composers.

Exploring fresh territory in the study of Joyce and music and of music and literature, Weaver argues that Joyce's characters and works operate between the extremes of order and disorder, harmony and chaos, music and noise, and that these polarities both signal and contribute to the rhetoric within the texts. Finally, he says, Joyce's rhetoric itself becomes music.