Although the text of this course is Finnegans Wake, its subtext is the nature of language and the reading process, issues that are inevitably raised by the difficulty of reading the Wake in habitual ways. It is a book that amplifies the musicality of language--T.S. Eliot contended that Joyce and Milton were two blind poets making music out of a language based on English--while at the same time emphasizing the way that sounds strike unexpected chords of meaning across the barriers of different languages. It takes as its main semantic unit not the work but the whole-yet-partial nature of individual letters, and it employs this technique in an impossible/possible attempt to encapsulate all human history in what Joyce called "the great myth of everyday life." Finnegans Wake is, in part, a history of Ireland written in the language of dream-comedy and embodied in the animated landmarks of Dublin, but the history that it recreates is also a cyclical and comic process in which each cycle recapitulates all other cycles. Similarly, each of its "narratives" is a version of all narratives, all revolving around the movements of fall and rise ("framm Sin Fromm Son, a city arose," 98.14), erection and dispersion, cycles that men and women define in different but complementary ways.

Finnegans Wake is also a book designed to be inaccessible to a single reader reading in isolation, a characteristic with the potential to transform the ostensibly private act of reading into an explicitly public and cooperative process. The structure of the course will necessarily reflect and facilitate "interactive" reading: each student will choose both an episode and a contextual "frame" in an attempt to define a unique perspective that can then be played off against other such perspectives in the seminar. As Joyce has said, you can only "Wipe your glasses with what you know." The main requirements will be seminar reports and a final paper which will be distributed to the other members of the seminar for group discussion.