Word: wakefulness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...gigantic laboratory experiment with language, Finnegans Wake is bound to exert an influence far beyond the circle of its immediate readers. Whether Joyce is eventually convicted of assaulting the King's English with intent to kill or whether he has really added a cubit to her stature, she will never be quite the same again...
Title. The title of Finnegans Wake comes from an Irish music-hall ballad, telling how Tim Finnigan of Dublin's Sackville Street, a hod carrier and "an Irish gentleman very odd" who loved his liquor, fell from his ladder one morning and broke his skull. His friends, thinking him dead, assembled for a wake, began to fight, weep, dance...
Whack Huno take your partner, Well the floor your trotters shake, Isn't it the truth I tell you, Lots of fun at Finnigan's Wake...
...this old song Joyce has played a characteristic trick. Besides reminding readers that they are in for an Irish evening, his title might be taken as a simple declarative sentence meaning that Finnegans wake up. Hence the implication: ordinary people (such as his hero) do not; the nightmare existence of Everyman ends merely in a deeper sleep...
Story. As readers hack their way through the thorny pages of Finnegans Wake, they become aware of certain figures and phrases that recur frequently-H. C. Earwicker, Anna Livia, Maggie, Guinness, Phoenix Park, the River Liffey that curves through Dublin. Tracing these characters and places as they bob in and out of apparently unrelated words and sentences, Critic Edmund Wilson has worked out the most intelligible interpretation of the book, supported by Joyce's own statement that, as Ulysses is a Dublin day, Finnegans Wake is a Dublin night. The long confused passages in which people change shape...