Wake -ing the reader: Reading 'Finnegans Wake

What is the experience of reading a literary work of art as famously unreadable and unapproachable as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake? More than any other, the Wake is a book that demands negotiation with its readers as they navigate through individual, investigative, and collaborative readings. Focusing on the affect upon the reader, this dissertation explores the aesthetic journey of reading Finnegans Wake and expects that an appreciation of how meaning is made out of a notoriously difficult and obscure book will further our understanding of all reading experience. Wake -ing the Reader: Reading Finnegans Wake uses Joyce's own aesthetic theories as a framework to trace the reader's progression through three stages of apprehension---Integritas, Consonantia, and Claritas---and monitors how the reader mediates between private and communal associations. Arguing against those who suggest that Finnegans Wake is antagonistic and elitist, this dissertation demonstrates that the relationship between the text and its reader is at once personal and collaborative and that reading the Wake is a peculiarly creative process. It establishes parallels between the processes of production and apprehension in order to explore how the aesthetic experience of the reader mirrors that of the writer. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce portrays Stephen Dedalus as a writer whose moment of pleasure---his "enchantment of the heart"---is a sensual, erotic, experience emanating from both his temporal world and his spiritual essence. Similarly, the reader of Finnegans Wake experiences the ultimate moment of satisfaction in a site of intermittence, where significance is more important than meaning, as he or she performs what Roland Barthes has defined as applied reading. Ultimately, how readers choose to interact with Joyce's literary artwork is prefigured by their individual life experiences and by the way they apprehend all forms of art. Therefore, because Finnegans Wake sheds light upon the reader in terms of the individual's understanding of his or her place in the world, reading the Wake is an existential experience.