Finnegans Wake Reading Group

The combined Finnegans Wake seminar, tutorial, and reading group will be reconstituted one more time this fall semester for its 14th consecutive (academic) year; that is, we have now completed (with some interruptions) 13 years of a projected 14-year seminar. The fall 2009 installment will thus be the Wake's finale, or a Wake for the Wake. As was the case these past 13 years, a mixed group of undergraduates, graduates, faculty, obsessive-compulsives, and Joyce incurables will meet weekly to read aloud this narrative sound poem and discuss that portion of the text. This fall's re-incarnation of the group will meet Wednesdays from 12-1:30 (more or less) and feature theoretical and source readings and include public performances.

For obvious reasons we have not historically begun each semester at the beginning (if that's the word) of the text. In fact, one couldn't begin at the beginning even if one wished since the novel has no beginning; its opening pages follow the final pages of the novel, nor has it an end since the final words of the novel precede the opening words. We conclude then (suspect as conclusions may be) that it matters little where one jumps into the process of textuality and constructed meaning so long as one overcomes inertia and jumps. Next fall we begin our leap with the final chapter that, in its turn, or turn and turn about, anticipates the opening of the novel. We are thus in the Prequel of sorts to the Wake. Our end is the thus the perfect place to launch a new beginning.

The seminar/tutorial is available this fall for 1 or 2 credits, but preferably for 1. This finale will continue the feature of close reading of 2-3 pages of FW per week, but since we are in the final chapter of the final book, the moment of ricorso, the (cracked) mirror to the text as a whole, a compacted if not impacted anthology of all its stories, we will focus much more on theories of the Wake in this final installment. Students taking the course for credit will need as usual to attend every weekly session, participate by taking regular turns at reading the text aloud, participate in the public performances, and present a seminar paper at one of those weekly meetings, this time on a major secondary or theoretical document.

Recording of the group reading excerpts from Finnegans Wake.

The following essays have grown out of the Finnegans Wake Reading group:

Andrew McFeaters, "Museyrooms and Moebius Effects: A Ruim of History in Finnegans Wake," Hypermedia Joyce Studies 12.1 (February 2012), available on line at: http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v12_1/main/essays.php?essay=mcfeaters

Nicholas Morris, "'Say yeh and wah say': Paronomastic Kenoma and the Idiotic Tetragrammaton in Finnegans Wake III.3," Hypermedia Joyce Studies 8.2 (July 2007), available on line at: http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v8_2/main/essays.php?essay=morris

Andrew E. Baumann, "'The River Ever Runs, And Anna Calls': A Joyce-Deleuzian Billet Deux,'" Hypermedia Joyce Studies 5.2 (2005), available on line at: http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v3/baumann.html