Finnegans Wake Research Seminar

The seminar is a reading group that has been running regularly since 2007. It reads James Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake, at a close level of detail, which the allusive and multi-layered work demands. Discussion is focused on the text and attention is also paid to Joyce’s manuscripts (copies of which are displayed on a screen). PhD students working on a range of topics (ethics, space, psychoanalysis, Catholicism, America, textual problems, Islam in the 1920s and 30s, fashion and clothing) attend and bring their own concerns to the group. Established academics, graduate students, and a healthy portion of non-academics attend regularly. As a reading group it is also a celebration of methods of close reading, and an investigation into what those methods entail.