Online Seminar Series: Finnegans Wake

Online Seminar Series

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

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Let us leave theories there and return to here’s hear.

Having done the longest day in literature with Ulysses (1922),  Joyce set himself an even greater challenge for his next book – the night. “A nocturnal state… That is what I want to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream.” Published in 1939, the book would take Joyce two decades to complete.

A story with no real beginning or end, the work has come to assume a preeminent place in English literature. Anthony Burgess has lauded Finnegans Wake as “a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page”. Harold Bloom has called it Joyce’s masterpiece, and, in The Western Canon (1994), wrote that “if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, Finnegans Wake would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante”.

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Join us as we read this text one chapter at a time, every other Wednesday afternoon. Click here to visit the Finnegans Wake Online Seminar page, with links to media and the Discussion Forum.

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May 17 Reading:

Book One – Chapter Five of Finnegans Wake by Joyce continued (Page 118),
Penguin Classics; Reissue edition (December 1999). ISBN 9780141181264

Also, Chapter Five of A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake by William Tindall

Syracuse University Press; Reprint edition (May 1996), ISBN 0815603851

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Schedule:

12:00-1:30 PM PDT

Tutor:

Barry Rabe

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Location:

Online. Register to receive the link.