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I've never even read "Finnegans Wake", and yet I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention the "ten thunders" at all. For example, Marshall McLuhan thought they were pretty important, and so does his son Eric. — Scott • talk 19:49, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
This is as good a place as any to describe a recent edit. I've added an edit along the above lines, and I intend to improve it soon. I particularly encourage proof-reading of the hundred-lettered words per the above. -MinnesotanUser — Preceding unsigned comment added by MinnesotanUser (talk • contribs) 09:25, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
"Tim Finnegan, born "with a love for the liquor", falls from a ladder, breaks his skull, and is thought to be dead."
de:WP Vico falls from a ladder, breaks his skull and remained unconscious for hours.
de:WP"In seiner Autobiographie schrieb Vico, dass er im Alter von sieben Jahren von einer Leiter gefallen sei, sich einen Schädelbruch zugezogen habe und fünf Stunden lang bewusstlos gewesen sei."--91.34.206.127 (talk) 09:27, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
Even these are a red herring, really. It's important to bear in mind that it is an Irish novel written in English. ""Joyce's method became one of "increasingly obsessional concern with note-taking, since [he] obviously felt that any word he wrote had first to have been recorded in some notebook." As Joyce continued to incorporate these notes into his work, the text became increasingly dense and obscure."" Another way of saying this is that Joyce did a huge amount of SHOE-HORNING, and this is how the wake reads. I read it in 1985, then I spent 30 years learning 9 or 10 European languages (well enough to read Proust twice in the original, for example). I've just re-read the first 150 pages of the wake. My reception of it is no different from 30 years ago. The interesting thing about the obscurity is that it is possible to read things in it that Joyce didn't intend but welcomed anyway. So if you look up mishe-mishe in Finneganswiki you'll see lots of possibilities, but no guarantee that Joyce was aware of half of them. And in fact, mishe mishe is always paired with teufteuf - French for choochoo train, at least I've noted it on pages 3, 145, 203, 225, 240, 249, 277, 290, 291. Finneganswiki doesn't seem to have cottoned on to this coupling). At the end of Watt, Samuel Beckett ambiguously writes "no symbols where none intended". In the case of FW, "no puns where none intended" would not be true! Dreams? See p.293 - "the death he has lived through becomes the life he is to die into". I think that expresses it better. The repeated cultural references may well all stem from Jung. It's easier to criticise the Wake if, as I do, you think Ulysses is a curate's egg. I think it's also important to realise that perhaps the Wake is becoming old-fashioned. I first became interested in Joyce 40 years ago, when the Wake was about 40 years old. It has doubled its age since then! And Joyce's Ireland is the Ireland of Queen Victoria, or Edward VII, if you are precise about Joyce leaving it behind in 1904 (and dreaming about it for, coincidentally, nearly 40 years).
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Reference to where the Chinese version is abridged? It's not yet **complete** as only Part 1 is published (and annotated like mad), but the assertion that Dai's translation is abridged seems unfounded. L talk 10:10, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
Aphra 10:53, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
Hi Alainna First, I apologise if this should have been written swhere else; I am new to Wiki ways and templates. Re Joyce: I would say that translations of parts/excerpts/fragments/chapters of 'Finnegans Wake' should *not* be mentioned in the entry. For two reasons. (1) A fragment of 'FW' is not 'FW'. (2) There are dozens and dozens of such attempts in lots of languages. (Why distinguish Dai Cong Rong's work then?) Btw I take 'unabridged/abridged' to be synonymous to 'complete/partial'. Cheers. [User:Wikibidd] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikibidd (talk • contribs) 10:53, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
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Should we allow partial translations? Compare this entry by Tosk Albanian with this one by Wikibidd.
I don't think we should include partial translations. What is the cutoff for size? How important are they? Kablammo (talk) 15:10, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
The article mentions the "Norwegian influence", that is, the allusions Finnegans Wake makes to Norway and its language. While this seems to be true (as I don't speak Norwegian, these allusions are among the ones I miss), Norwegian is not the only language the books frequently alludes to. It is rife with Dutch, German, French, Latin, Irish, Spanish and other puns, and as a Ducthman I don't miss references to Dutch topography either. So why include a separate section specifically about Norwegian influence? Steinbach (talk) 10:48, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
I studied Finnegan's Wake with the Wake specialist, Edmund Epstein and never did he describe the book as a comic fiction. Is comic sourced? If not I would remove it. Finnegan's Wake may have funny parts but its far from comic.(Littleolive oil (talk) 23:10, 3 April 2018 (UTC))
There has been deletion, reinstatement, and now some deletion (by me) of many external links. Can we discuss what external links are needed here, in light of wikipedia policies? I've expresses some opinions in my recent edit summaries. Kablammo (talk) 23:15, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Is FW translatable into other languages? Has it been attempted?
This article says the term "quark" originates from Finnegans Wake. Should it also say that the word "quark" should be pronounced to rhyme with "sharK"? Vorbee (talk) 18:33, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
I had to click on 4 of the linked articles to be able to understand the following sentence:
"The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words to unique effect"
And I still don't really understand what it's trying to tell me within the context of the novel. It's an impressive sounding statement but can someone please simplify it for those of us who aren't language majors? I think there might even be a wiki rule about simplicity if I'm not mistaken. I'm going to continue reading the article but this was really a put-off of an introduction.
It shouldn’t even need to be said that not everybody is going to understand a sentence using words like “neologistic” and “idiosyncratic” and “portmanteau”. Also, “standard English lexical items” is a hell of a synonym for “word”. Of course people should be able to understand the page, that is the point of an encyclopedia article, to inform general interest. Anyway, I tried to revise it but the edits got reverted. Gonna post about this and leave it at that. Julkhamil (talk) 21:54, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
I just really cleaned up the page and some Wikipedia bot flagged it and deleted it. Just felt like commenting on this. 2A02:3034:10:3A04:FC1D:6214:CB75:FDA0 (talk) 19:55, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
The below has been the default intro for a long time. It was fine as a fill-in for lack of anybody making it better, but I just seriously revised it and the edit got reverted. It is not so good that it needs to be preserved. It is a very slipshod piece of writing with some pretty vague and random sounding sentences:
“Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon.[1]
“It is well known for its experimental style” - maybe it is, but that’s not a very definite assertion. What does it mean for something to be “well known”? Known by how many people? And what evidence is there that it is “well-known” in this way?
“One of the most difficult works in the Western cabin.”
- maybe it is a difficult book, but why, and in what way? Also, the concept of a “western canon” is not integral to a discussion of Finnegans wake - it is a separate topic which could be mentioned in the article, but not as the forefront giving context to the entire topic. Finnegans wake doesn’t have to be thought about in relevance to a “Western canon”.
It has been called "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables ... with the work of analysis and deconstruction".[2]
- I’m sorry but this is one of the worst sentences I was trying to get rid of. It isn’t informative at all. If you were new to FW, what would this mean to you? It “combines fables with the work of deconstruction”. I think they are trying to say that the book invites analysis due to how much information there is embedded into each page, but this is not a clear way to say that. “Deconstruction” is not the most general introductory thing somebody show hear or know about FW. It sounds like a pretty mangled, corrupted quote from some article that never really got cleaned up. I tried to do that, but my edit got reverted.
Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work.
“The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English words with neologistic portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms and puns in multiple languages to unique effect.”
- as someone else pointed out, there is a lot of verbiage here. It could be written way smoother, cleaner and clearer. “To unique effect” is pretty vague and doesn’t add that much to the reader’s understanding of the book.
Many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams,[3] reproducing the way concepts, people and places become amalgamated in dreaming.
“It is an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text; “
- this is another really bad line I was trying to get rid of. It almost makes no sense and is really strangely vague. What is FW? Oh, it’s a book where this writer tried to combine their aesthetic ideas. Oh, ok. Interesting. (Not.)
Joyce declared that "Every syllable can be justified". Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.[4][5]”
The fact that this has persisted as the final line for so long it starting to really bug me. It feels like there’s someone who doesn’t like FW who keeps insisting the article conclude on the note that basically nobody likes the book (which comes after a diatribe about how it’s the world’s most freakishly complicated and experimental book). There are many people who see Joyce as imaginative, comedic and playful. The tone of the entire intro is not neutral, descriptive or informative.
My edit was by no means perfect and more work needs to be done in it, but I really hope more people can support trying to stabilize the edit until anybody wants to contribute something better. This old version has had its time, and its time is over. It is very poor, the caricature of why Wikipedia articles can sometimes be surprisingly poor-quality in spite of the positive reputation the website has. Julkhamil (talk) 22:07, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
Finnegans Wake has come up a couple of times in some research I'm doing on irony. Wayne Booth dubs it "The Encyclopedia of All Ironic Wisdom" at p.212 of A Rhetoric of Irony. Northrop Frye calls it "the chief ironic epic of our time" at p.323 of his Anatomy of Criticism. I popped over here to see if there was an appropriate place to incorporate one or both of these references (I'm not a fan of decontextualized critical pronouncements, even when the author is famous). To my surprise, a search on the term "irony" brings up only one hit, and it's in the bibliography (so there is at least one actual Joyce scholar who thinks this is important enough to include in a monograph subtitle).
My knowledge of the secondary literature is mostly limited to weekly reading assignments given over a one-semester seminar during which we also read the entire book (!). I don't remember any of it being expressly on irony. Does this feature of FW seem to others like it deserves a paragraph somewhere? Any article-length reading suggestions?
Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 19:22, 21 December 2023 (UTC)