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About the NY/PHL Finnegans Wake Reading Group
A friendly and low-key way to work through James Joyce's labyrinthine classic Finnegans Wake. We meet once a month. We do about five pages per meeting together (no homework).
All are welcome.
N.B.: As of October, the group decided to keep it Philly for a while...all meetings will be in Philadelphia at Brickbat Books until further notice
AND: Check us out in James Joyce Quarterly! (Spring/Summer 2008)
Contact Janine Utell to be added to the mailing list, or for more information.
Next meeting: February 21, 2010
* * * * *
Date: January 10, 2010
Pages: 38-44
Big Ideas:
- the telling of the story: "the gossiple so delivered in his epistolear" (38.23)
- the sailor gets drunk => tells the story => becomes a ballad => gossip/history/myth
- popular history and tales v. literary and historical authority: "the rhymers world was with reason the richer for a wouldbe ballad" (42.12)
- relationship between orality and literacy = Joyce destabilizes a stable print world
* * * * *
Date: December 13, 2009
Pages: 33-38
Big Ideas:
- HCE's crime: masturbation? micturation? voyeurism?
- decoding deviant sexuality
- the incestuous family romance
- the Irish question: surveillance culture, uprising, guerilla tactics
- scandals: Parnell, Wilde
* * * * *
Date: November 15, 2009
Pages: 27-33
Big Ideas:
- ricorso: "cursed and recursed"
- HCE: the history of the family, the disgrace
- ALP: "she was flirtsome then and she's fluttersome yet"
* * * * *
Date: October 25, 2009
Pages: 19-27
Big Ideas:
- hero/antihero, epic/mock epic
- different uses of language: self-conscious storytelling, newsiness, letter-writing
- the Prankquean: the ludic impulse, the invader/colonizer
- wordpress, printing press, winepress : reading and the rise and fall of civilization
* * * * *