5. Finnegans Wake

2021 ◽  
pp. 75-96
Author(s):  
Colin MacCabe
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
The Family ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
Take All

‘Finnegans Wake’ assesses James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce attempted to write a book which would take all history and knowledge for its subject matter and the workings of the dreaming mind for its form. Four themes surround the book: language, the family, sexuality, and death. In Joyce’s attempt to break away from the ‘evidences’ of conventional narrative with its fixed causality and temporality, two Italian thinkers, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, were of profound importance in the writing of Finnegans Wake. Bruno and Vico are used in Finnegans Wake to aid the deconstruction of identity into difference and to replace progress with repetition.

Joyce's Indifferent Animals: Boredom and the Subversion of Fables in Finnegans Wake

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cliff Mak
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
Beast Fable

This piece explores the multitude of animal figures in Joyce, especially with regards to his engagement with the classical moral mode of the beast fable. Drawing from a number of texts throughout Joyce's corpus – from his early essays on Dante and Defoe to the fables in Finnegans Wake – I show how a young Joyce's poetics of boredom (as derived from Giordano Bruno) informs his later work through the figure of the animal. Granting his animal figures a certain amount of agency, Joyce uses them to subvert the didacticism of fables, the colonial instrumentalization associated with this didacticism, and even the cultural authority of modernism itself, his own work included.

The Italian Yearbook of International Law

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 342-358
Author(s):  
R. W. Ianni
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Abstract Approach ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Subject

To the impressive list of Italian periodicals on international law led by the prestigious Rivista di Diritto Internazionale there has now been added The Italian Yearbook of International Law, published exclusively in English. Italian scholars have made a very significant contribution to doctrinal developments in international law; however, some of their work has gone unnoticed because Italian is not among the languages in widespread use in international law circles. In addition, Italian scholarship has suffered somewhat from what some consider to be an overly theoretical or abstract approach to the subject matter. While it is always a noteworthy occasion to welcome a new member into the family of international law yearbooks, the advent of the Italian yearbook is particularly noteworthy, contributing as it does to the accessibility of a broad range of material and learned comment. It is appropriate, therefore, that the first issues of The Italian Yearbook of International Law receive extended comment in the pages of this Yearbook.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Colleen Jaurretche
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Lord's Prayer ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
Theory Of Language

The introduction shows Joyce’s preoccupation with prayer across all of his works in demonstration of his ongoing use of it as a mode of language. Focusing on the writings of Origen, Giambattista Vico, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin, the introduction lays out how prayer is a theory of language through exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer as it appears in Finnegans Wake (as Isolde’s night prayer). The introduction concludes by making the case that the four parts of the Wake are progressive and cohere around concepts of language as prayer.

‘The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’

Tempo ◽  
1977 ◽  
pp. 24-29
Author(s):  
John Buller
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Creative Power ◽  
The Family ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
The Devil

The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies—on Part II of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce—lasts about an hour. It is for soprano, tenor and baritone, seven female voices and six male, with an instrumental group of 13 players: flutes, oboes, clarinet (doubling contrabass clarinet), bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, 2 trombones, percussion, keyboards, cello and bass. There is also a ‘Manager’—either ‘live’ or on tape. The text selected is from a comparatively self-contained section of Finnegans Wake, separately published by Joyce as a fragment under this name in 1934 but now just the first section of Part 11, sometimes referred to as the Children's Night Games. It fuses children's games with life/sexual games, describing humiliation and extreme loneliness and the realizing creative power of building from these with the mythologies of the fall, of parenthood and of the family, with jealousy and incest, closing with the almost central Joycean prayer: ‘Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low’. In it, the two sons of HCE, Shem and Shaun, now as children called Glugg and Chuff, are outside their father's pub in the evening with their sister Issy and her seven girl friends (though they sometimes disturbingly multiply into a lunar monthly 28). The game is Angels and Devils and Glugg is the devil, Chuff Saint Michael, whilst the girl/angels or harpy/maggies think of a colour—but twist it to the colour of their knickers. Heliotrope is the rather unlikely colour and three times Glugg is allowed to advance and try three guesses.

Synge Scholarship: Nothing to Do with Nationalism?

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 272-275
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER COLLINS
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
John Millington Synge ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Irish Drama ◽  
The Family ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
Nodal Position

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) is the fulcrum upon which Irish drama and theatre studies is balanced. Synge's nodal position is predicated upon the dramatist's rock ‘n’ roll recalcitrance towards the dramaturgical praxis of his contemporaries; his subject matter was as shocking as the Anglo-Irish idiom in which it was articulated. After Synge's premature death in 1909, W. B. Yeats's fundamental concern was that Synge scholars would attempt ‘to mould . . . some simple image of the man’. However, W. J. McCormack's concentric biography of Synge, The Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge, and Ann Saddlemyer's The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, have demonstrated that Synge's life was complex, multifaceted and in deep dialogue with Irish culture. But with respect to Synge's drama a simple image has surrounded critical discourse: the politics of Irish nationalism.

Joyce and Geometry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciaran McMorran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Euclidean Geometry ◽  
Henri Poincaré ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Mapping Space ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
The World ◽  
Giordano Bruno

Following the development of non-Euclidean geometries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Euclid’s system came to be re-conceived as a language for describing reality rather than a set of transcendental laws. As Henri Poincaré famously put it, “[i]f several geometries are possible, is it certain that our geometry [...] is true?” By examining James Joyce’s linguistic play and conceptual engagement with ground-breaking geometric constructs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this book explores how his topographical writing of place encapsulates a common crisis between geometric and linguistic modes of representation within the context of modernity. More specifically, it investigates how Joyce presents Euclidean geometry and its topographical applications as languages, rather than ideally objective systems, for describing the visible world; and how, conversely, he employs language figuratively to emulate the systems by which the world is commonly visualized. With reference to his early readings of Giordano Bruno, Henri Poincaré, and other critics of the Euclidean tradition, it examines how Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works enters into his more developed reflections on the codification of visual signs in Finnegans Wake. In particular, this book sheds new light on Joyce’s fascination with the “geometry of language” practiced by Bruno, whose massive influence on Joyce is often assumed to exist in Joyce studies yet is rarely explored in any detail.

THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-425
Author(s):  
JAN ELLEN LEWIS
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Feminist History ◽  
The Family ◽  
Anglo American

Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Ruth H. Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003)Barbara Taylor entitles her new book Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. The imagination in question is Wollstonecraft's, but, like Wollstonecraft, Taylor is interested in the imagination more generally, both the problems that the imagination gets women into and the ways in which the feminist imagination can get women out of those problems and help them imagine a more just and equitable future. Ruth H. Bloch's aim in Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800, the newly published collection of her essays, is somewhat more modest. Although her chief objective is to analyze the transformation in American views about women, gender, the family, and religion in the era of the American Revolution, she also offers case studies in the use of a culturalist approach to feminist history. Although there are important differences in approach and subject matter between these two books, their similarities and areas of overlap—not the least of which is that their authors are two of the best feminist intellectual historians at work today—make it instructive to review them together.

scholarly journals Joyce...Bruno...Ulysses

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael I. García León
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
General Consideration ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Giordano Bruno

Abstract:Giordano Bruno has been a philosopher traditionally connected to James Joyce. Nevertheless, Bruno’s influence has been associated to Joyce’s last and enigmatic work, Finnegans Wake. Apart from this general consideration, this paper tries to prove that Joyce’s youth readings on Giordano Bruno were a serious infuence on his most famous work Ulysses. Although it might be true that Joyce did not read Bruno as a primary source –he, indeed wrote a review on a book on the Italian thinker, we can conclude that Bruno was an important source on Joyce before he even conceived writing Finnegans Wake.Key words: James Joyce, Giordano Bruno, Literature and Philosophy, Ulysses, “all in all” theory.Resumen:Giordano Bruno ha sido un filósofo que se suele relacionar con la obra de James Joyce. Sin embargo, la influencia de Bruno se suele asociar con la última y enigmática obra del irlandés, Finnegans Wake. Amén de esta consideración general, este artículo intenta demostrar que las lecturas juveniles de Joyce fueron una influencia seria en su obra más conocida, Ulises. Si bien puede ser cierto que no leyó a Bruno en el original, publicó una reseña sobre el pensador italiano y podemos concluir que Bruno fue una fuente importante en Joyce antes de que ni siquiera concibiera la escritura de Finnegans Wake.Palabras clave: James Joyce, Giordano Bruno, Literatura y filosofía, Ulises, teoría de “todo está en todo”

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