This course is an intensive reading of James Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake. A cyclical novel incorporating over fourteen intertwined languages, Finnegans Wake is widely regarded as the most difficult novel ever written. Indeed, Jacques Derrida once wrote an entire lecture on two words in the over 600-page book — he war. Nonetheless, the text is not impenetrable; in fact, it can be musical, whimsical, and even humorous. Working as a group, we will spend the semester working through the entire text as a class. We will not understand everything, but we will try to find our own ways into one of the most confounding texts of all time. The course is predominantly discussion-based, but we will offer a brief lecture once a week offering context and summarizing relevant literary criticism. Students will have the choice to either lightly read around 50 pages or intensively read a shorter excerpt of the text every week. In group, we will unpack the text in addition to performing a number of exercises, such as accented reading and word-analysis (which is way more fun than it sounds).