For next week

[Zachary Bos]

Now, we haven't as a group gotten (near) to Page 185 yet, but I think
that this article might be a good way to kick off our summer study
group -- it is closely attuned to a circumscribed portion of the text,
and is pleasingly free of theoretical salmagundi.

I'll bring copies of the paper and
http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/fw-185.htm to O'Leary's.

I'm looking forward to this new enterprise of ours. We have so much
fun with our weekly quasi-mystical, multidisciplinary exegesis each
week, but it will be nice to pull the camera back a bit and take in
larger issues of narrative, method, and character. It is, after all, a
book meant to be understood, and not just a Ouija board whose only
meanings are those we impute to it. Cf. JJ's letter in 1926 to Harriet
Shaw Weaver, where he worries to her whether he's the book works as a
novel as well as a palimpsest: "Will you let me know whether the plot
begins to emerge from it at all?"

See y'all tonight for drafts and draughts.

- Z

Reference:

Finnegans Wake, Page 185: An Explication
Robert Boyle
James Joyce Quarterly
Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall, 1966), pp. 3-16
Published by: University of Tulsa
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486603