There Will be Neither Fin Nor Again...

When I first perused the syllabus for this class and read that all one had to do in order to get an A in this class was finish Finnegans Wake, I was all for it. Even if it was a difficult book, a semester to do it would absolutely be enough time. Well, I was wrong. One semester could not possibly provide anyone with enough time to get through the book and grasp any meaning whatsoever. Yes, one may be able to read (which is much different than pronounce I might add) all of the words in the novel during that time, but that is not the same thing as reading the book. There is so much thought put into a single page of Joyce's book that one could spend several months decoding even that. In fact, we have a blog assignment to attempt to decode one page and it will most likely take mos people the full semester. After taking the class on Vladimir Nabokov last semester I felt quite accomplished, and thought that if I could get through his novels (on a still admittedly superficial level), I could get through anything. ames Joyce takes high brow literature to an entirely new level. Although I do intend to continue to attempt to make my way through Finnegans Wake, I am by no means under the illusion that I will finish it anymore. Even if one were to read every page of the novel, it would still be impossible to do so because the end is in fact the beginning of the novel, and the beginning its end. So the joke is on anyone who thought that they would attempt such a feat. It is impossible...so you might want to start catching up on the other readings and work on getting an A the way one would in a "normal" class taught by Dr. Sexon. Which of course isn't normal at all...