Annotation
COURSE DESCRIPTION & SYLLABUS
The two-semester course will attempt a close reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, his “night book”, arguably the experimental text to emerge from the interwar avant-garde scene, and yet one whose avant-garde affiliation remains a highly problematic one. By means of focusing on particular passages from across the whole book and exploring some of their famous techniques (the pun & the portmanteau, multilingualism, the sigla, the acrostic, textual recycling & circularity, the coincidence of the narrative "character" with the written "character", etc.) the course will consider how Joyce’s radical experiment revolutionised the novel genre and the potential of his "revolution of the word" for further critical thinking on the materiality of language. Apart from a selection of FW-guides and criticism, the course will supplement its close reading with screenings of particular audio-visual recordings from the First-We-Feel-Then-We-Fall online project.
MOODLE LINK TO SYLLABUS & ALL READINGS https://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=4769