Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

ISBN-13: 9780199215867 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 288 str.

Finn Fordham

Opis

This book is a critical introduction to Finnegans Wake and its genesis. Finn Fordham provides a survey of critical, scholarly, and theoretical approaches to Joyce's iconic masterpiece. He also analyses in detail the compositional development of certain key passages which describe the artist (Shem) and his project; the river-mother (ALP) and her "first kiss;" the Oedipal shooting of the universal father (HCE) by the priestly son (Shaun); and the bewitching and curious daughter (Issy). His analyses demonstrate 'genetic' ways of reading the text which illustrate its immense range and playfulness and how these qualities were generated in composition.
As well as opening up the densely detailed textuality of the Wake in all its multiplicity, Fordham argues for a relation between the way the text was formed and key aspects of its thematic content: an uprising of particularity and detail against universality, absolutes, and generality. He shows that the proliferation of individuated textual details overwhelms any unitary concept to the text. And this reflects an idealized and utopian uprising as it overcomes centralizing singularity: Finnegans do wake up. As part of this argument he proposes a qualified return to a notion of character - qualified in that characters can be understood in part as reflecting the character of compositional techniques: self-criticism and concealment, expansion and growth, flow and reflection, transferral and transformation. The character of the text's composition as a whole can be, paradoxically, summed up in the force of individuated multitudes: in the people, male and female, young and old, combining to overwhelm syntactic uniformity and singular signification.

Recenzje

Finn Fordham has given us an important and major new study of Finnegans Wake, one that investigates the book with unparalleld intensity and in a brilliantly unique way. Among its many other accomplishments, Fordham's work contributes powerfully to the renewed upsurge of interest in what Helen Vendler has called "the art of close reading", offering its reader both a compelling defence of the practice and a brilliant exemplification of its exercise. Finn Fordham is a great and electrifying reader. No one else reads the Wake with quite the same kind of depth or intensity...This is a book that should appeal to and reward both the seasoned reader of the Wake and the novice... Its genetic exegeses are mind-widening and fun... [It] is a powerful and thought-provoking new study, one that will stimulate and reward any interested reader of the book. This is first-rate and important work.

O autorze

Finn Fordham is a lecturer at the Royal Holloway University of London a graduate of the University of Cambridge, and carried out doctoral work with Professor Steven Connor at the University of London on the influence that Lucia Joyce's breakdown had on the composition of Finnegans Wake. Publication of his thesis proved impossible because of difficulty securing permissions. Fordham nonetheless transferred his knowledge and enthusiasm for Joyce's final sprawling comedy to produce several articles. He also writes on 'genetic' criticism and reviews contemporary fiction. He has held British Academy and Leverhulme awards for his research and is currently working on comparing writing processes among Modernist writers.