5/28/2023 0 Comments An encounter james joyceSome of my favorite Dubliners studies are in fact by Finnegans Wake scholars: John Gordon and Margot Norris come immediately to mind (links are to the books I recommend). I wouldn’t be surprised actually if the term has been used before, for the practice itself certainly has. It’s a little something I like to call Reverse-Reading, a practice that brings insights into the earlier works that quite simply would not be possible otherwise. Do this as if these books were written in this order, as if they were intended to be read in this order, as if this were their natural order of ascending complexity, and no fool in their right mind would dare even crack open Dubliners without first having fully immersed themselves in the later works – particularly Finnegans Wake. So for the nonce (but not really), I’d like to recommend the following programme: Start by reading Finnegans Wake, and when that’s done, read Ulysses, then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and finally Dubliners. Go, Set, Ready! There are lots of ways to read Joyce, and really, none of them are conventional.Īfter all, Joyce’s writing remains outside even today’s boundaries of convention – a full century later.
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