Reading Finnegans Wake (Part II)
This post provided some suggestions for first time readers of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It also included a reading list. However, Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake is out of print and has also vanished from at least three public libraries. Fortunately, the James Joyce Scholar’s Collection has put Hart’s book online. You can access it directly here.
All the books in the James Joyce Scholar’s Collection are out of print, but below are links to a few you might explore after getting through my original recommendations.
A Classical Lexicon for Finnegans Wake
The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis
A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer
Joyce-again’s Wake: An Analysis of Finnegans Wake
The Sigla of Finnegans Wake
Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake
Third Census of Finnegans Wake
The “Wake” in Transit
All this assumes, of course, that you have actually read Finnegans Wake, the book. If you haven’t bought a copy, the full text is available here, courtesy of Trent University. You can find an interesting, annotated version of Finnegans Wake at finwake.com.
I happened to run across your website while browsing. Comment? Uh, well, I probably hold the Guinness record for taking more than a half century to read the book. In the aggregate, including all the backtracking, I have read it hundreds of times. Riverrunning the book again, I find that each old/new page takes on a new mosaic. I (sort of) started as a grad student in 1958, when I dropped in on Thornton Wilder’s Finnegans Wake Society in New Haven, and was puzzled by what the wisemen referred to as the work’s “grids.” That was back in the olden days when a student’s toolkit was used to assemble what we then called “meaning.” Occasionally, I was spurred on by arguments with my old friend, Joe Campbell. Now in my retired dottage, I can lose myself for hours in those glorious pages.