James Joyce never used quotation marks, calling them ""perverted"" and ""unreal"". This book springs from that aversion, presenting an account of citation from the ancient world forward and tracing Joyce's transgressive relation to that history from ""Memorabilia"" to ""Finnegan's Wake"". The author argues Joyce's rejection of the mark signals a wider and deeper rejection of the system it implements, one in which the subject/object separation presents an orderly containment of language and readers. She locates the rhetoric of quotation at four places crucial to contemporary debates: authorship, feminism, historiography, and modern criticism.

Foreword by: Zack Bowen