"Raidin the Wake" is the name of the Boston College Finnegans Wake reading group. It is comprised of BC faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and the wider Boston community. We meet weekly at Murray House on BC's campus to analyze Joyce's famously difficult text.

Established and maintained by Professor Joseph Nugent and doctoral student Patrick Moran, the group is now in its second year. The nature of our meetings is like the nature of the text itself: funny and yet serious, specific and yet wide-ranging, jovial and yet intellectually rigorous.

Beyond our goal of developing an understanding of Finnegans Wake, we hope to foster a community of inquiry--one in which to discover the diverse ways that people working in different fields discover meaning in complexity. Typically we meet for an hour and a half, in which time we read a portion of the Wake aloud and then parse each line carefully. In the past, dependent on the baroqueness of the passage, our analysis has ranged from one paragraph to two pages in an evening. Often, conversation extends beyond the meeting and into the celebratory outings that follow.

This semester, we will be meeting on Thursday evenings at 7:30. We welcome and look forward to new faces joining us and old members returning.