'Earmarks of Design': Finnegans Wake, Aurality, and Joyce's Common Reader.

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939) confounds 'common readers,' an elitist epithet for those who might otherwise be termed non-academic, non-specialized, non-conscripted, non-professional, or plain readers of Joyce. The flattened image of this common reader, as it is often constructed within Joycean and modernist thought, is at odds with the heterogeneity of actual readers, as well as with the anticipated common reader whom Joyce writes into the text of the Wake itself. Nevertheless, there is a commonality which unites the varied constructions of this reader: that aurality or listening to the text is for them the most viable method of accessing something as difficult as the Wake. In this article, I interrogate the constructions of this common reader to arrive at the meaning of an aural common reading of Joyce. Through a reading of the Wake, I argue that aurality as a mode of accessing the text is sanctioned by its design, and further, that the instability of listening facilitates the reader's recognition of that design. I also suggest that an aural common reading of the Wake constitutes a challenge to its authoritative and authorized readings, and reconfigures notions of its ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]