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For the fall semester, we will be meeting on Thursday nights at 7:30 at Murray House (in the second floor conference room). For info on Murray, click here.

The Boston College Center for Irish Programs Newletter (Fall 2006. vol. 10. no.1) had an article on "Raidin the Wake":

Raidin the Wake

“It’s meant to make you laugh,” said James Joyce of his great last work, Finnegans Wake. It certainly succeeds, says Joe Nugent, and that, according to the Asst. Professor of English and Irish Studies, is what accounts for the huge success of his reading group, “Raidin the Wake.”

Once a week last year (and beginning again in September) he and a selection of faculty and students met after hours in Connolly House to read and interpret (to the degree that it’s possible) this notoriously impenetrable novel. If “novel” it is. For the 500-odd pages that the great Irish writer produced over seventeen years to confuse and bewilder academics rejects pretty-well every convention of the genre. In their place, the ever-playful and always devious Joyce concocted a selection of puzzles, word-games, puns and portmanteaus that draw on dozens of languages and an astonishing range of disciplines.

Scholars and students of religions, math, music, history, physics, linguistics, philosophy, and much besides will be excited by the bawdy excesses and stupendous erudition contained in this eerie chronicle of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s (or is it Leopold Bloom’s?) dreaming life. In it they find Joyce’s wholly original and perfectly unique take on the absurdities, terrors, and desires that infest our unconscious minds. Taking on the preposterous task of reading all this can be a delightful, but, Nugent warns, a sometimes unnerving experience.

Reading the Wake, and raiding its sparkling gems and twisted jewels, is, according to Nugent, therapy for the obsessive academic. Irresistible to scholars, this book is the perfect vehicle in which to deploy “those vast hoards of otherwise useless material that we academics have spent our lives ferreting out and accumulating.” Group therapy, for it can’t with profit, says the professor, be read on one’s own. As with therapy the work is slow: “we manage,” he informs us, “sometimes as much as a page a week.” But, unlike therapy, a happy result (he asserts) is guaranteed!