Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- References and abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction: On being a Joycean
- Chapter 1 Deconstructive criticism of Joyce
- Chapter 2 Popular Joyce?
- Chapter 3 Touching ‘Clay’: reference and reality in Dubliners
- Chapter 4 Joyce and the ideology of character
- Chapter 5 ‘Suck was a queer word’: language, sex, and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chapter 6 Joyce, Jameson, and the text of history
- Chapter 7 Wakean history: not yet
- Chapter 8 Molly's flow: the writing of ‘Penelope’ and the question of women's language
- Chapter 9 The postmodernity of Joyce: chance, coincidence, and the reader
- Chapter 10 Countlessness of livestories: narrativity in Finnegans Wake
- Chapter 11 Finnegans awake, or the dream of interpretation
- Chapter 12 The Wake's confounded language
- Chapter 13 Envoi: judging Joyce
- Works cited
- Index
Chapter 11 - Finnegans awake, or the dream of interpretation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- References and abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction: On being a Joycean
- Chapter 1 Deconstructive criticism of Joyce
- Chapter 2 Popular Joyce?
- Chapter 3 Touching ‘Clay’: reference and reality in Dubliners
- Chapter 4 Joyce and the ideology of character
- Chapter 5 ‘Suck was a queer word’: language, sex, and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chapter 6 Joyce, Jameson, and the text of history
- Chapter 7 Wakean history: not yet
- Chapter 8 Molly's flow: the writing of ‘Penelope’ and the question of women's language
- Chapter 9 The postmodernity of Joyce: chance, coincidence, and the reader
- Chapter 10 Countlessness of livestories: narrativity in Finnegans Wake
- Chapter 11 Finnegans awake, or the dream of interpretation
- Chapter 12 The Wake's confounded language
- Chapter 13 Envoi: judging Joyce
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
Nor does it seem to me quite legitimate to get arse out of heart. Have you read any of those books about Baconian ciphers in Shakespeare? Those theories can sometimes be made to seem quite plausible.
Edmund Wilson to Thornton Wilder on the latter's interpretation of Finnegans Wake, 1940By the mid-1980s it seemed that the notion that Finnegans Wake is the representation of a dream, or a night's sleep, was beginning to lose the secure hold it once had over the book's interpreters. Two general introductions, both entitled James Joyce, may serve as evidence. In 1984 we find Patrick Parrinder observing that the idea of the Wake as ‘night-language’ – which, he says dismissively, ‘is still heard from time to time’ – ‘reflects the same rather crude notion of imitative form that Joyce invoked to defend some of the later chapters of Ulysses’ (James Joyce, 207). In 1985, Bernard Benstock, writing about ‘what commentators insist on referring to as dream language’, comments disparagingly on ‘the easy conclusion that “Finnegans Wake is a dream”’ (James Joyce, 148, 152). The three essays on Finnegans Wake in the 1984 Bowen and Carens Companion to Joyce Studies also suggest that by the mid-1980s the idea of the dream commanded less support than it once did: one pointedly ignores the idea, one discusses it briey to reject it, and the third makes use of it, but with a note of scepticism.
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- Joyce EffectsOn Language, Theory, and History, pp. 133 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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