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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, alternating between Philadelphia and New York. All are welcome.
Date: June 28, 2009
Place: New York Irish Center, Long Island City, Queens
Pages: 13-16
Big Ideas:
- how to read: go backwards, be humble
- the creation of language leads to the failure to communicate
- all language is counterfeit
- stuttering, lisps, lying: misshapen, misused language is more truthful
* * * * *
Date: May 17, 2009
Place: Brickbat Books, Philadelphia
Pages: 7-13
Big Ideas:
- hubristic act of being monotheist, reducing God to one
HCE -> Moses -> problem of trying to speak authoritatively of divinity - English believe their own (false) legends but the Irish don't/can't
are the Irish fallen without having known greatness? Do the Irish have expertise at being fallen?
fall of a giant -> fertility -> our daily bread - Is the Wake a return to Babel-language?
- Willingdone Museyroom - House That Jack Built
museums are collections of pickings from corpses, another form of feeding from the dead - history as myth, epic, gossip, rewrite/spin, scholarship, chronicle, record, catalog, scorekeeping, repetition, combination
* * * * *
Date: April 19, 2009
Place: New York Irish Center, Long Island City, Queens
Pages: 6-8, line 8
Big Ideas:
- Finnegans Wake: the importance of waking and whiskey, food and prayer
- HCE as geographical figure: Howth and Environs
- Entrance into the Wellingdone Museyroom
* * * * *
Date: March 22, 2009
Place: Brickbat Books, Philadelphia
Pages: up to 6, line 13
Big Ideas:
- opening pages as prologue: Shakespearean, overture, announcer
- introduction of characters and their avatars: HCE, ALP, Shem and Shaun, Issy
- relationship between religion and empire: macrohistory and microhistory
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